Greetings and welcome to the Before you start forum.
Drupal is a flexible and powerful Content Management System / Content Management Framework that allows a number of people of varying levels to build websites. That said, there is a learning curve. How steep depends on your starting skills and your end goal. Despite the learning curve, Drupal is not rocket science and with a reasonable amount of work most anyone can learn to use and build sites.
As Drupal is a CMS with a built in forum system our community contributed documentation resides in the handbooks which is built with the Book module. These can be reached through the Documentation tab at the top of the page.
The Drupal community has never been overly concerned with marketing, as a result the install base is largely invisible unless you know what to look for. For a sampling of Drupal sites check out these links.
To learn more about the project itself check out the The Features, Mission, and Principles of the Drupal Project.
To see the pre-requisites and some best practices check out Installation documentation and the best practices page.
Drupal is over seven years old and has had 13 full releases. Which version should you use? The latest that has the modules you need to build sites with. Currently the community supports the current release version and one previous. You should be aware of the stance on backwards compatibility
Still have questions? Start a conversation.
Please, no flames or rants