Why don't kungfoomanchu 5x5x5 edge guides work for me?
I am trying to learn to solve the 5x5x5, and am primarily using Andy Klise's guide at
http://www.kungfoomanchu.com/ , with help from some other sources online and my own methods I already use to solve the 3x3x3 and 4x4x4.
I am stuck at joining the last two edges.
Klise's guide is comprehensive for all cases with the last two edges, but I must be reading something wrong, because the algorithms don't seem to be accomplishing the result I expect. I may be misunderstanding the notation; I thought that I understood cube notation, but there are a couple of things in his guide that seem different from what I thought I knew.
I read some of the sticky threads here; one included a link to a notation site which seems to be down:
http://solvethecube.110mb.com/notation.html , and one included a link to the wiki which provides a helpful notation page that clears up a couple of things I didn't understand, but still doesn't seem to answer all my questions.
For starters, what do the parentheses mean in this algorithm?
x' d (R F') U (R' F) d'
Because when I work this algorithm it doesn't seem at all to do what I think it should do. I tried the variant beneath and that doesn't seem to do anything different.
Second question: for this algorithm, one face of the cube is displayed: is that supposed to be the top of the cube, or the front? Because no matter how I position it, the algorithm seems to affect edges over on the side of the cube, away from where I expect. I discovered that version 2 of Klise's guide is still reachable on his site (the current edition is version 3), and it displays these cases differently, suggesting that the unjoined edges go on the front face, and displaying the algorithm without any cube rotations, but the algorithm still does not seem to work, moving from one last-two-edges-case to another rather than finishing the last two edges.
I am probably missing something that would be obvious to a much more experienced cuber. I came here for help because Klise's guides link to a thread here.

I've searched and found a couple of threads discussing his guides, but nothing indicating anybody else has had this problem, so I am certain that I am just misunderstanding something about the notation, but I can't find anything here or with Google that is clearing this up for me.