Outstanding answers, folks. This is a great community!
If I ever manage to get on top of this cussed language, I hope to reciprocate by posting some material aimed at newbies coming from areas like line-of-business with scripting languages, which is where I've done most of my coding. This is a different world.
Even though this is a learner's forum, it's clear that most of the people taking up D have a strong background in gnarly systems languages like C++. The on-ramp for people like me is pretty steep.
I'm not whinging - given the lack of corporate backing it's pretty amazing how mature this language has become - and I'm very aware of the huge and selfless investment the developers have made. But it's definitely more intimidating to tackle D than one of the more trendy languages like Go or Julia where there are plentiful learning resources.
For starters, it's now clear to me that a strong understanding of Templates is essential to make much headway - that's why I got stuck here. They are dealt with towards the back of the books, but you really can't understand much of the library code without them. That's the first gap I'm going to fill.
So thanks again - without this kind of support it would be pretty much impossible for newbies like me to get up to speed.
