Learning D

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Monday, 25 August 2014 at 16:46:11 UTC, Ryan wrote:
> Me: Software developer for 30 years.
>
> So perhaps this is old fashion, but I wanted to start using D 
> by whipping together nice little personal utilities.
>
> I tried installing MonoDevelop and Mono-D.  I can't even figure 
> out the basics, such as adding references to a project.  There 
> are no options in the context menus, and although it looks like 
> drag an drop might work (a '+' sign appears by the cursor), 
> dropping a file from the filesystem doesn't work either.
>
> Although I dream of someday being able to add a reference to a 
> project, I'm not really sure what I might drag in.  I managed 
> to download and compile GtkD, since it seems like a GUI would 
> be a nice place to start (again, old fashion).  I got three 
> *.lib files out of it... Hmmmm... Maybe these are references??
>
> I had installed the Visual Studio plugin, but I don't want to 
> use this since I would like to eventually migrate away from 
> Windows.
>
> Let me cut to the chase.  I have no friggin' clue how to start, 
> and I can't seem to find a tutorial anywhere...
>
> What IDE should I use? I'm not big fan of Eclipse, although if 
> I had to use it this wouldn't be a dealbreaker.  Give me 
> something easy and lightweight, unless you've got a GUI builder 
> (this is why I started with MonoDevelop, though this isn't 
> working so well for me).
>
> What Widget library should I use?  I started with GTKD, but 
> since there are no tutorials does this mean nobody actually 
> does this?  Should I use DWT?  What about QT?
>
> I just want something simple and mainstream to start learning D 
> with.
>
> Any thoughts?

Mono-D + dub (see code.dlang.org) is the easiest way to get 
things working quickly. Mono-D has builtin support for dub.

For learning D, see Ali's book: 
http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html (from scratch) or Andrei's 
"The D Programming Language" (for the more experienced). Adam D. 
Ruppe's "D Cookbook" also has interesting examples of usage.