Hello Richard,

I think that coding with PP is at least one level ahead, if not two!, of the one required to code with iziBasic. And, I agree that the learning curve is rather high at the beginning, but it is worth it at the end.
For instance, Khertan started with iziBasic, then he developed a few PP applets, and finally for one of his projects which requires a lot of low-level accesses (his kLauncher project) he switched to PP after having built the concept with iziBasic.

I think that iziBasic can already cover most of what a developer needs. For instance, ViziBasic is 99.9% made with iziBasic. The 0.1% made with a PP applet is just a very small piece of code to have DOC files recognized by DOC readers.

Overall, the principle is the following:
1. use iziBasic for maybe 90% to 99% of the coding
2. use a PP applet for what requires high speed execution/calculation, or for very specialized things... or to compensate some of iziBasic's weaknesses...

To get started with PP, you will need:
1. indeed some Pascal knowledge ;
2. the SDK from PalmSource with all PalmOS APIs that may be invoked ;
3. read the PP sample applications (I wrote most of them and you will easily find that many of them are also those provided with iziBasic: NekoCat, Numerus...) ;
4. get the help from the PP Compiler forum, there are many PP developers around too and they are all very nice helping people.

Khertan started to provide some PP applets examples (it's in French but with some online translator, you should get to understand):
here: http://www.khertan.net/index.php/Devpalmos/2005/05
and here: http://www.khertan.net/index.php/Devpalmos/2005/06
I also provided one here, some time ago:
http://www.aldweb.com/thread.php?lng=en&pg=5961&id=2
And, Khertan again, gave us a code snippet here not long ago: http://www.aldweb.com/thread.php?lng=en&pg=7543&fid=1&cat=80

I was thinking, not later than a few weeks ago, about trying to have all these first pieces of information and knowledge gathered together in an area of this web site.
If anyone feels like helping the iziBasic growing community in this area of PP applets, I would be more than happy.
Currently, I am too much overbooked to really find the time to help you as much as I would want to (this is a pity and I apologize for this).

Cheers,
aldweb