The Disappearance of the Universe, by Gary R. Renard. It is a very approachable explanation of another book, A Course in Miracles. It is the first thing that has ever succeeded in budging me from my fundamentalist Christian views.
Yes, it's normal. Low productivity for a newbie is pretty standard. Even if your programming chops are fantastic, you come into a new job knowing nothing about the domain they are programming in, which may be very complex and have a long history, and nothing about the tools, the code, the architecture, and so on, which may (and often does) suck. I am seeing this right now with a new hire where I work. She's competent, but just drowning in all the stuff she has to learn. I was here when our system was and designed and built, and I did a lot of the designing and building myself, so I have a deep understanding of how it works, an understanding that I think would be incredibly hard to come by second-hand. It can take years to become fluent in a big system.
Same here. I almost gave up on Firefox and went back to IE. I downloaded Chrome the day it was first released and have used it ever since. Chrome had some nasty bugs and shortcomings early on, and I almost gave up on it, too, but subsequent versions have kept me (mostly) satisfied.
I would use something like this, but, as inerte says, you need a heck of a lot more selection. Maybe you could team up with designers and resell their work, giving them a cut?