User Guide > Basics > Nodes and attributes > Nodes and attributes overview
Anyway, this is one of those things where a tutorial does you quite little good, whereas understanding how it works get you going. Now the real problem is that users dont actually read the right section of the manual., the real manual is:
the Node Reference
All persons doing rigging, shading, scripting, or API programming (sic) or other development except the day to day animation should almost daily read this reference, because without this you redo 90% of the thing you pay for. The auxiliary to this is that the real maya editor is the hypergraph or the new Node Editor, because that what is doing all the work in maya.
As to understanding how to operate nodes is another thing altogether, it can not be taught in one tutorial. Its founded on your entire education, you would need pretty well rooted academic base education to understand what the potential is. Its a bit like maths you need a lot of foundation to do anything interesting with it.
But basically its just making a new time node (createNode time) and animate its time, and connect it to the time attribute slot of your animcurves. Thats it they now no longer work on global time but with local time thats somehow disconnected form global one, and thus can skip frames at will.
PS: Blaming documentation or software does you no good, the reason theres not just one set of mater documentation for everything and only one software for everything is just that they can not be one piece of thing. Otherwise there would be one and just one of anything. So as a result you should never look at one piece of something as a exact raplecement fo something else, but rather it has some good things and bad things that are different.