I find Textile somewhat frustrating. I’m not really sure it’s better than HTML, because I have to learn so many random codes now. While it may be simpler than HTML, I’m not really sure it’s any easier to learn, especially since HTML actually uses tags that make sense semantically. For instance <strong> makes sense to me. I don’t have trouble remembering that. *strong* seems faster, but only once I’ve memorized it.
Anyway, I have to use it often, so here is my list of resources:
Textile Resources:
http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/
This site will take standard text, or textile input and output it as HTML. This lets you play with textile and dial in exactly how your site will look. This is great if you know HTML and are trying to learn textile for wikis or other CMS that requires textile input.
http://hobix.com/textile/
This is just a big list of tags ordered logically, with their HTML equivalent and a preview of how it would render.