[Building Sakai] getting started with... ?

[David Beahm]

I am a full-time developer and part-time educator interested in working 
with this project.  I have a reasonably good understanding of Java, 
servlets, and HTML, but have less experience with some elements of 
Tomcat configuration and am completely new to tools like Maven.  I look 
forward to gaining more hands-on time with these technologies, as much 
of my work has had to be in .NET.

I have been following the directions to setup the development 
environment for 2.5, but after seeing some of the questions on this list 
I am wondering which version of Sakai I should start with. 

Best regards,
David