About a year ago, I started to a write a component for joomla 1.5, from scratch, without books, just with the online doc (which is nevertheless good). It was not so easy to understand what the new joomla 15 framework needed to be able to work, it's so different from joomla 1.0. This component does a fantastic job creating all the necessary file, basic function, database....and really easy to use.
Of course, one has still to understand MVC concept but EasyCreator is a big help for starting to write an extension.
Congratulation!