IMO the
original documentation does a good job.
I'll try an explanation for the most important options.
-f, -h, -hh are the basic options. They control the compression ratio, the encoding and decoding speed. -f is faster than the defaulted normal option both when encoding and decoding, but it yields an inferior compression. With -h it's the other way around: slower, but better compression than with defaulted normal mode. -hh is the extremer version of -h.
It's personal taste which option to use, though I guess to most users -f isn't attractive.
There's an additional -x option group which slows down the encoding process but yields a better compression ratio. The effect is the larger the faster the basic compression option is. There are 6 members of the -x option group adressed by using the option -x, -x2, -x3, x4, x5, or x6, with -x being the weakest and -x6 the strongest version.
I highly recommend to use at least -x, and up to -x3 the slowing down of the encoding process can easily be tolerated on modern machines IMO. -x4 and higher is still useful, but the slowing down becomes more and more obvious, while the additional decrease in file size becomes more and more negligible usually.