Samarkand is easy to see and hard to understand. Two days will get you the Registan, Shah-i-Zinda and Gur-e-Amir, all of them heavily restored and all of them worth it. What these blogs add is everything around the edges: the shared taxis, the high-speed train tickets that sell out, the bazaars where nobody is selling to tourists, and the question of what Timur's capital was actually like before the Soviets rebuilt the tilework.
The most immediately useful of them is The Helpful Stranger's self-guided walking tour, which strings the monuments together in an order that works on foot and in the right light. The others supply the reasons to stay a third day once you have walked it.