Project setup blues

Today, (or rather, yesterday) I started working on my part for my cpsc 310 group project (introduction to software engineering). I was assigned the task of working with another member to develop the GUI and I, specifically to learna about Google maps and make sure that a map appears in our application. Briefly, our application pulls property tax data from dataVancouver and displays filtered information in the form of a map or table. I thought it would be a pretty neat idea to see how property taxes are distributed in the region of Vancouver, so we'll see how this turns out! If successful, I hope that our application will show some kind of pattern in property taxes in different regions of Vancouver visually on a map. I began the other night, looking for ways to get the google maps into our application. I began a new project and everything was a-okay until I looked at a few introductory applications in google code... Turns out there was a Google Maps API version 2 and 3. Let's say I spent a little too much time trying to get v3 working because I didn't know like they were calling v2 a deprecated API... So I spent the whole night (and the next night) scratching my head and pulling out chunks of hair trying to figure out why the sample application wasn't working out. I moved the jar file around my project, downloaded different versions of the jar file and moved those around.. Tried different tutorials and internally cried blood. I later on, in a nutshell managed to finally get the map to appear in dev mode. *phew*

Lesson learned: In software engineering, dealing with project setup - a tedious task that all programmers have to deal with is inevitable. It's part of the process of software development. I wouldn't believe it if anyone was able to start with an errorless project in which build paths are correct, the correct jars are installed, and everything's compatible. Everyday, new software is shared, old software is updated. Compatibility issues are bound to arise due to these software updates and improvements.
Now, I think I've come to the point where I realize that if I'm not experienced enough, I should be prepared to spend hours searching up solutions on google to see what the problem is with my project and why certain errors occur. I'm prepared to spend the ENTIRE day searching for a solution. The next day even. Distractions are a big nono.  ( I should've realized this before though, this definitely wasn't the first time I ran into project setup pains )

Some of the solutions to my project setup problems:
- restart IDE (if you're using one.. Eclipse in my case)
- start afresh. (delete the entire project and start the setup process again)
- check and ensure that you have the right versions of everything - Jars -- libraries, APIs...
- ask someone, they might have a clue. Otherwise, they serve as someone to keep me sane for the duration of my hair-pulling project setup experience. -- good reminder that everyone (computer scientists..developers) goes through the same painful experience.