How to clone

Greetings fellow growers. I am new to this site and new to growing in general. I have virtually read all of the Indoor Horticulture Grow Bible and still have numerous questions about cloning. All i have been able to figure out is that you cut a stem off of a plant in the vegatitive state, dip it in some rooting hormone, and stick it an inch or 2 into a special soil. My questions are:

1- Do you simply take a whole stem (leafs and all) and cut it at the stalk, or can a large stem produce many cuttings. Basically, how large does the cutting need to be?

2- I hear people saying they take hundreds of cuttings. Is this a process over time as the new stems grow back from the mother? And how many cuttings are safe to take from a mother (lets say 3 months old) at once?

There is much confusion on this subject and I (and im sure other people) would greatly enjoy some advise. thank you much and take a hit for me .

Start your first cutting on the bottom branch. Assuming the marijuana plants are doing well and have lots of new growth coming in, carefully select a small branch that includes at least a quarter to half inch of stem, and cut it off on a slight angle from the host plant.

Number you can take from a mother plant depends on how many branches or off shoots the plant has. The cutting should be about 6 inches.

So then, i would assume that if i had a footlong branch, i can cut it in half and thus make 2 healthy clones? And i believe i've heard that if you cut a branch off at the main stem, 2 branches will grow to take its place. Is this true?

Here's another good one:

http://users.lycaeum.org/~npkaye/cloning_ph2.html