I also had difficulty with the tables the first time through. Unfortunately, it doesn't really lend itself to online explanation: "this thing here, goes here, and that thing there goes there, and ..."
What you might try is to get some angular momentum decompositions already worked out - 1 + 1 = 1 is a particularly good one - and then try to match terms with the table of C-G coefficients. It's easier to see how this works when going "the other way".