ANN for prediction, can't get an intuition here, requesting info and sample.

I have used quite a few statistical models in the past, and have built a few base ANN, including completing the Stanford ML course. I am trying to test my knowledge by building an ANN for predicting demand for a seasonal product, but, I can't seem to get an intuition for how these are used for predicitions. Nothing I have found online has helped so far, and I was hoping at a minimum to get a better understanding here, and at best maybe a working example so I can see how it is all tied together. I have used SPSS, MatLab, Octave, R and I can program in C#, VB, and somewhat in C++ if you have anything related to those. Thanks