[bramblerose]

I have the same (and ran into this trying to wrap my head around why Maven didn't work... I don't want a tutorial explaining how to get started, I need to understand the fundamentals to understand what's happening!).

I think, however, that starting from the examples might help with good API design: if you design your API to be "core concept first", this will likely lead to an API that _can only be used after you understand the core concepts_, which is not great when people are only occasional users.