In Matthew Emerton's comment on Terry Tao's blog, he speaks about learning etale cohomology or the theory of Neron models as "black boxes". By this he means that you can learn what the theory is about and how to use it, without going into the detailed proofs of why they can be used.
Which theories (e.g. etale cohomology) can be learned as black boxes?
And where would one go (e.g. find lecture notes) to learn something like that?
Notes on something like this would ideally give you an idea of what is going on, give examples, and most importantly illustrate how they would be used to solve problems. I am mainly interested in arithmetic algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory, so I would especially like to know about "black boxes" in this direction, though "black boxes" in other areas might also be worth knowing about.