Oh man, I've definitely felt this pain many times lol:
"The samples will be missing lots of implicit information such as how to install the necessary libraries and how to deal with missing dependencies and version conflicts. Transcribing and modifying the examples may lead to bugs that suck up time. It's not terrible, mostly thanks to sites like stackoverflow, but it's still a lot of unnecessary distractions from the task at hand."
So many times, the actual programming isn't tough, it's just getting all of the stuff around it setup that is hard.
This is what I have mostly with Rails; when I started working with it I was good at Ruby but didn't use Rails and for a beginner it's horrible. There tons of options for everything, everything is badly documented, most things scratch an itch so when you use it, some of the completely logical things you expect are missing. Samples of gem usage randomly skip steps which can be a hair pulling exercise for a beginner. Then when you finished your app and try to update gems a week later, everything breaks completely. And this is not an attempt at trolling; I now use Rails daily and build rather huge projects in it and this still upsets me. When things work and you know how they work, all is easy and great, installing and using. When either or both of those are not true, you are in absolute hell, especially as a beginner. And nothing of that has to do with actual programming and it shouldn't be needed; your environment should solve this for this imho.
"The samples will be missing lots of implicit information such as how to install the necessary libraries and how to deal with missing dependencies and version conflicts. Transcribing and modifying the examples may lead to bugs that suck up time. It's not terrible, mostly thanks to sites like stackoverflow, but it's still a lot of unnecessary distractions from the task at hand."
So many times, the actual programming isn't tough, it's just getting all of the stuff around it setup that is hard.