I agree this is a good starting point for understanding the financial system! For anyone with a programming background I recommend thinking of the whole financial/economic/political system as an algorithm for distributed decision making: who does what, what physical resources get committed to what projects, etc. You can then start to figure out how each component (money, banks, central banks, government, stock market, derivatives market, limited liability, interest, inflation, etc) serves to guide decisions.

The main purpose of a central bank imo is to keep money creation at arms length from government, so a rubbish government can't fiddle with the financial system too much.