Lift is very complicated. Nobody currently knows why a wing can create lift. It's similar to the fact that nobody currently knows why there is inertia. We have detailed theories and laws where we can accurately predict how inertia will affect an object and we know inertia is proportional to mass but we don't know why. To get the best understanding of lift I've found that you need to understand as many theories regarding lift as you can. All the theories tell the story of lift that's not complete and all from different angles. When you analyze lift from all these different angles you start to build a pretty decent understanding of lift. I'd recommend getting the basic understanding of all the theories (or as many as you can understand) and then keep going over them, and every time that you do go over them you should be able to go further in depth.
Regarding the rotating cylinder: it's showing that a rotating cylinder has a similar effect as an airfoil does. They both produce lift, they both increase the speed of flow over the top and decrease the flow over the bottom. There is upwash and downwash. This will tie into Kelvin's circulation theorem. Eventually this Magnus effect should seem somewhat intuitive.
Magnus effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Tulla posted a nice explanation here too.
No. A prop pulls, a jet pushes. A wing is the surface area which is pushed by the fluid.
That's hard to define. I think it's easy to see that a jet pushes as it accelerates a flow of air behind it at a higher velocity. But a propeller actually pulls 50% and pushes 50%. Consider a prop that accelerates the local flow velocity by 100 m/s. There will be a 50 m/s increase by the time the air reaches the propeller and the last 50 m/s increase will happen somewhere down stream of the propeller. So with either a Cessna 182 or a Piaggio Avanti II, they both pull AND push.
http://www.gidb.itu.edu.tr/staff/emi...R_THEORIES.pdf
Equation 13 and the paragraph below that show this. I like that document as the way lift is created for an airplane is the same way thrust is created for a ship. A different way of looking at it might make it clearer. The document is orientated more towards the physics inclined person.