Where can I find a good intro to random forests?

While I know a little about regression and associated topics from Andrew Ng's class, I'm a total newb to trees, bagging, boosting, and random forests. What's a good place to start? I'm willing to put in the time, but feeling a little lost.

Things I've already tried: Hastie-Tibshirani-Friedman's "The Elements of Statistical Learning" is comprehensive but difficult as a first intro, whereas the JHU "Practical Machine Learning" class on Coursera quickly breezes through all of the above leaving me feeling like I have little understanding of it.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, even if they are "Go back to The Elements of Statistical Learning and read it ten times!"