I do not wish to use this as an attempt to convert people to that which is D. I merely want to make it know why I use D, where I started, and give some help out to those that are going to try it. And to those that do, I will give that which is also stated on the Official Homepage, do not learn D as a first language.
I started my programming ventures with ZZT-OOP. This was actually a pretty good way to learn, you'd have to enjoy the game though. I didn't take a liking to programming very early on like my brother, but work with some HTML starting in seventh grade. It wasn't until ninth grade that I had attempted a "real" programming language, Perl 5. This was great because I could generate my HTML frame using a text file for content. I never finished.
Within the next two years I ended up reading about half of "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days." In this time period I found Digitalmars' site on D. I don't remember why, but I found it and liked what I was reading. I made no real attempt to learn it. There was nothing that would teach me to program, I really hadn't done anything at this point. I decided I would come back to it.
The summer before my Junior year in High School I got my self to learn PHP4. Keeping myself busy with that for the summer and the first semester of school. Once I reach the second semester I had a Java class, taught by a teacher that just learned in that summer before. She was actually really competent on the subject. My knowledge of C++, note I only read half the book and wrote two programs from somewhere near the beginning, made the class a breeze. We learned a lot of the basics, and by the end of the semester had a ball bouncing across a window.
Senior year second semester I had another Java class with the same teacher. This time it concentrated mostly on GUI. Once I got to college I was able to skip several of the beginning courses for programming and went into Programming Principles 2. I got to learn more basics, linked lists and stuff. I even threw in a nice GUI for one of my projects.
The next quarter was Data Structures, which was once again concepts. This was the quarter I decided to look back into D. And when I did, it seemed to be much bigger. I found it very easy to pick up. I ended up taking the assignments given in class and rewriting them in D. I got myself familiar with the community and have found it to be a great language.
D is a language for those that are willing to put up with a language at it's infancy. D's community has created a mass of competing and disjointed projects. Everyone has something they wish to get into D, but has a different approach then those that have already been started. If you think about it, C was in worse shape when it started because every compiler did their own thing. I still have a lot to learn, but hope that I will be learning how to do whatever it is in D as well.