Better chance for beginners.

Hi, i'm 3 days old in Arduino terms now, and found it very difficult to get started, most of the tutorials on the web are becoming outdated, and create a lot of confusion for beginners.
However, i persisted, and finally opened a pdf i received after purchasing my starter kit, which blows all the other info ive read away.
The book is titled Beginning Arduino by Michael McRoberts.
In it he gives very nicely detailed hows and whys to everything, where as others don't.
I highly recommend this information being stickied in the Programming section.
(I assume i would get in copyright trouble if i attached this book to the forum, so i wont unless requested.)
I mentioned this to another forum member who agreed with me and suggested i post my thoughts here.
Hopefully someone accepts this idea, and many more Arduino beginners can have an easier, shorter learning curve, and hopefully stop some people being turned away from it by their confusion (i had thoughts along these lines, but i would not give up, lots of others will!).

Thank you.

It seems to me that beginner problems fall into one of several categories.

  1. "I'm not a programmer..."
    Well, get over it. You bought a micro-controller. Learn to program it.

  2. "I'm not an electrical engineer..."
    You don't need to be. Google is a great resource. If the issue is that the cheap crap you bought on e-bay doesn't come with a data sheet, support people/companies that DO provide the information needed.

  3. "I want to..."
    Do something unrealistic. There are any number of posts that want to do real-time video processing, that is currently only possible using dedicated, expensive hardware, on the Arduino.

There are a few others, but they escape me, at the moment.

Now, I'll admit that it has been a long time since I was a beginner programmer, and I'm perhaps not as sympathetic to newbies as I could be, but too many people won't make the effort to learn.

I don't know which, if any, of the above categories you think would be helped by posting a link, in a sticky, to that book, but I'm not convinced that a sticky is a good idea. People won't even read the "How to post in this forum" sticky.

Thanks PaulS for your response.

The other one is
Can you help me
Which means
Will you do it for me.

Help is what we give, but it is not doing it for you.

I dunno. The whole "tutorial examples are outdated and don't work anymore" seems like a pretty valid complaint... It's unlikely that all tutorials everywhere would get fixed, but official tutorials should be updated.

@PaulS, @GrumpyMike - I understand where your comments come from but I think they are unfair to the OP who made a serious comment about the situation that he found AND mentioned a solution to that problem.

(Both of these elements are usually missing from the sort of "helpless" beginner posts that you give rise to your complaints)

@googs, it would be a start if you would provide a link to the book. How much does it cost?

...R

@westfw and @googs What tutorials on arduino.cc do not work anymore?