The first paragraph of the tutorial explains it quite clearly
There are times when you do not want one statement to take effect unless another one completes. For example, when the proprietor of The Coffee Break updates the amount of coffee sold each week, he will also want to update the total amount sold to date. However, he will not want to update one without updating the other; otherwise, the data will be inconsistent. The way to be sure that either both actions occur or neither action occurs is to use a transaction. A transaction is a set of one or more statements that are executed together as a unit, so either all of the statements are executed, or none of the statements is executed.