Fastest way to learn D?

[Craig Dillabaugh]

On Tuesday, 15 October 2013 at 18:36:19 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 October 2013 at 18:32:59 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh 
> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 15 October 2013 at 18:25:48 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
>>> On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:13:45 +0200, ProgrammingGhost wrote:
>>>
>>>> What is the fastest way for me to learn D? I think what I 
>>>> want is a
>>>> syntax reference manual and a good tutorial to learn how to 
>>>> find and use
>>>> libs.
>>>
>>> I learned D by doing two things.
>>>
>>> 1) Downloading the bundled DMD in a ZIP file.
>>>
>>> 2) Reading the language reference at http://www.dlang.org 
>>> (back then it
>>> was on DigitalMars website...)
>>>
>>> That is all you really need.
>>>
>>> Now I would suggest reading the D Wiki as well. ;)
>>
>> You really learned D from the online language reference?  
>> Thats hard core!  You must be much smarter than me.
>>
>> I suggested reading the Phobos docs online, but I was just 
>> joking.
>
> I did too. I don't see it as particularly 
> hard/only-for-smart-people, I just built simple programs and 
> slowly looked up what I needed as I went along. A lot of help 
> from people here and on IRC helped as well of course.

There is a lot of good information in the language reference, but 
I just remember it didn't feel very welcoming to someone new to 
the language. It does show how to use the different parts, but it 
is sort of hard to figure out what a proper D progam should look 
like from all that.  But as Dicebot pointed out, it wasn't all 
that long ago that there were not many other options.