My first experience as a D Newbie

[Peter R]

I've recently started evaluating D, and I thought as a D newbie 
(but 20 year game dev veteran) I should share the things I felt 
were missing or unclear, so you can decide if you want to do 
something to cater new users. So my first notes are

1. Reading about D online: There is a decent amount of 
information seems old, and it's hard to tell for newbies that D1 
and D2 are different. Andrei's book seems like it is still the 
best reference for the actual language, but since it is 7 years 
old, as a newbie I expected it to be out of date. Maybe a 2nd 
edition?
2. Set up the dev environment: While the language is solid, and 
the base DMD install and "hello world" are easy to get going, 
getting a full IDE configured is a lot more work. I would really 
like a comprehensive guide to go from there to having a full 
environment set up in for example VS Code. I've spent weeks 
trying to get VS Code configured, and still haven't gotten 
debugging to work. An idiot-proof step by step guide would be 
nice, maybe like this "step 1 install VS Code from this link, DMD 
from this link, Dub from this link, step 2 install these 5 
extensions in VS Code, step 3 make these manual changes to the 
configuration, step 4 download this sample project and open it, 
step 5 here are the 5 important commands you need to build and 
run". If there was a 15-minute guide, it would be much easier to 
get to the parts that matter.
3. Setting up the dev env,take 2: Visual-D seems a lot easier to 
configure, and it had functional samples. However, it was strange 
that it doesn't use dub files directly and instead needs them 
converted to visual studio build projects. I would prefer if it 
the msbuild projects would just directly call Dub, as Dub seems 
like the gold standard. My first attempt at generating a solution 
from a dub project failed, so it feels maybe a bit unfinished. It 
would also be great if Visual-D had a few more detailed templates 
built in, maybe a Derelict SDL window, for example.
4. it took a while to see that the DMD builds come with x86 
windows libraries, but no x64 windows libraries. That seems 
strange in this day and age

I'm still very new on the actual language, but thought it better 
that I share this while it is still fresh.