The google documentation has a minimal tutorial. There are implementations for all of the major languages. The level of documentation in the ecosystem, though, is poor. My best recommendation for you is to jump in and get the tutorial/hello world example working in a language you're comfortable with.

They aren't hard to use, but they aren't the easiest thing either.

Once you get the gist of the API through the tutorial, the other important topics that come up immediately are version control; git repo design; headers and framing.

In production, they've been bulletproof. As long as you account for the compile time issues (schema versioning, repo, headers and framing, etc.).