can a novice create a drupal website?

I want to create a website with drupal but i'm finding a lot of the language in the instructions to be foreign to me. I'm sure i could learn but is there a steep learning curve?

It seems newcomers are finding that some Drupal books are much easier to understand for them than most of the current online documentation (especially O'Reilly's "Using Drupal", book called "a lifesaver", etc., by users).

Anyway, if you wish to just learn online and work hard, try first Understanding Drupal (on concepts, terminology...) in the Getting Started section. There is also a Drupal FAQ, a Cookbook for beginners, etc.

With clear books and/or documentation for beginners, and a lot of practice on a test site (try for example Acquia Drupal stack installer -DAMP- on your PC, or other distributions), the learning curve can be reduced from months to days, to build your first Drupal site.

I am also new to Drupal and I would say that the learning curve is fairly steep at the beginning but it seems to me to be worth it if you are going to make multiple sites or even one site that is fairly complex. There is a time investment at the beginning but it does seem to be a flexible system that you can use for just about anything so there is a payoff. On the other hand if you are going to set up a simple site that is not going to change very much there are probably easier ways to get it up and running.

I found the online documentation that juan_g mentioned above to be good particularly the getting started with drupal video series .

If I'm being honest I find it very difficult. I have a computing degree and come from a C++ background but I have made several websites over the years and trying to build a social networking site is a bit of a nightmare. I think the main problem is getting all the different aspects to work together, when they possibly haven't been designed with each other in mind in the first place.

I guess it depends how complex you want your site to be. For a site with simple pages and navigation I think it's very do-able after you've spent a few hours familiarizing yourself with the back end.

I went from minimal web coding experiance (Frontpage) to deploying Drupal, played around with it for about a month, and now have a couple basic but quite functional web pages with extensive Views/CCK behind them (photography website, gaming website, and one for a dance troupe). Having had no prior CMS/CMF experiance I probably wasn't 'tainted' and therefore was able to pick it up pretty readily. I did have a good working knowledge of databases and queries so that probably helped when I 'broke' something when learning Drupal.

The O'Reilly book on Drupal is quite helpful too IMO.