Angelo7

"I can't remember what exactly I didn't get working, but I just felt very lost and overwhelmed, and that was spending a couple of days reading around online, looking at the code and examples."

Exactly.

I don't want to feel "lost and overwhelmed" when trying to learn some new product, or having to Google every single thing. It is a wonder anything ever gets done. Seems these things are written by someone in their ivory tower without any forethought to documentation. "Someone else wants to learn it? Not my problem! I developed it, so there! No good documentation for you." That is just lame.

"Also: a lot of these tools have tutorials that don't really walk me through all of what I want to do, which initially involves a fairly straightforward "CRUD" type of application. I want to see how the framework deals with both 'make me a new one' and 'edit an existing one' forms, for instance."

Couldn't have said it better myself. I can't count the number of times I had been excited about learning some new framework, only to discover that their documentation is non-existent, poor, or written for rocket scientists.