Essentials line and Compendium, does this mean I can start over?

[AbdulAlhazred]

The advice I've started giving people thinking about getting into 4e is either:

a) just get a DDI subscription and d/l the Character Builder. You'll have access to everything you need to build and play a character. You can use the on-line compendium to look up keywords, conditions, and the like.

or

b) wait for Essentials and start with that.

Personally I think 'A' is a somewhat questionable concept. For a decent number of classes you can do this, but there are some really significant sections of the rules that cannot be acquired from the DDI Compendium. For one thing you lack a way to get a comprehensive overview of topics like combat. You can find definitions of a lot of individual terms, but you can't for instance find out how the rules for attacking what you can't see work. You can't get the rules for death and healing, familiars, beast companions, etc. Certain entire sections simply don't exist in the compendium either. In fact the stats for familiars I believe are nowhere present. The general rules for hybridizing, multi-classing, details of how PPs and EDs work aren't there, etc.

You CAN certainly make a character and as long as you're playing in an experienced group where other people have the books and you're not expected to know anything outside of the specifics of your character you can get by and play. There's no way you could have a group that played with just DDI though. Someone needs at least a PHB and realistically a DMG at some point.