The other week my husband said to me a set of magical words.
"I think I want to try Dungeons & Dragons"
FINALLY
Well, I've never run a game, but I've thought about it and have some ideas kicking around, so I told him I was game, to ask some of his friends to form a party since this was his game (with fill ins from my friends if needed to bolster the party size to our target number), and I dug out my 3rd ed books.
Of course, in the years since I've last played D&D (mostly done WoD and Star Wars over the last 7-10 years) there have been some new versions to come out. Like many D&D players I don't talk about 4th ed, but I was hearing good things about 5th. So I started him out getting an idea of the classes & races in 3rd and placed a hold on the 3 core 5e books. In the meantime I spent some time making my way through my 3rd ed DMG.
Once my 5e DMG came in I sat down and started flipping through and what hit me immediately is how much better the information flow is in this book. In terms of what I needed to know to build a world and run a game the organization is fantastic.
It is important to note that there is really nothing in here about character creation, beyond information on creating classes/races and playable monsters, all of that is in the PHB.
At this point we've successfully done character creation (with me not having had a chance to read through the 5e PHB, just flipping through while he's also trying to read, in order to guide him through the process) and my books are on order.