I am slowly getting a multi-vehicle (single master) fleet working
under ROS (Fuerte).
That has entailed a lot of work on the original code to make it work
under the new infrastructure, plus learning how all the various
pieces have to be chained together.
Just a little background in order not to appear as just a whining
student not able to do his own homework.
I started getting to know ROS around October 2012, and since then I
found the way information is conveyed and displayed to be far from
perfect.
The beginner tutorials are one of the few good examples I found
since then: a comprehensive chain of ever more complex topics until
it gets you to a working node example being able to exchange
messages.
That's about the last mildly inclined path, from there it's all but
free climbing without protection!
Build systems, transforms, publishers, urdf models...
Every argument has links on its page, but clicking a link is not
equal to learning.
A link means that an argument shares a connection with another, but
this connection should be explained.
On the contrary the various arguments are just linked together
usually without any explanation as to how that link happens to be.
For example I had to fight an entire day to understand how the urdf
model, the robot state publisher and the various transform prefixes
have to share some commonality in order not to have unconnected
trees or RVIZ utterly refusing to show data because a topic is
missing its reference frame.
This is nowhere to be found (or at least I've never found it
explained anywhere).
And I'm still fuzzy about it, I wouldn't dare write a tutorial on
it. Besides I wouldn't even know what to file that tutorial under.
So I think that what we are seeing here is the usual very-open
source development problem: since there is (almost) no central
control, information generation and sharing is up to participants.
Thus information quality lacks.
I don't have a solution recipe, save to propose a little team to
(periodically) check the documentation status.
As a first step I suggest covering the basics in a comprehensive
tutorial that goes from installing the packages to have a full
working robot (even if only simulated).
Maybe an extension of the turtlesim with a simple urdf to also
explain tf trees and publishers would be nice.