I don't Trust My Book

I'm using the textbook "Introducing Autodesk Maya 2014" tutorial book Dariush Derakshani. I think that was our first mistake. With every tutorial we've covered in my course, they've either forgotten a crucial step, assumed (wrongly) that the person following the tutorial would remember art of a step mentioned halfway through a tutorial two chapters previously, or would flat-out get the operation wrong. I'm thankful that the pdf is available online so I can show screen-caps from it.

Now, i'm not saying that's the case with the Lamp tutorial;however, I can't help but sit here perplexed when, after following the tutorial by the letter, what should turn into one of these highlighted items:

I instead get this hollow ring:

 I set everything how the book said prior to creating the ring, and the next set of steps moves on to copying and pasting the product of the CV tool curve. So, according to the book, what i did was supposedly correct. and yet, a setting is clearly wrong. I can only imagine that, when it had me center the pivot point, it centered on the wrong point, thus creating the ring. It makes sense; the center of the ring is clearly in the center of the scene. however, I didn't see any move tool or anything pop up when I centered the point, and the tutorial didn't say to move the project to the center; I'm clearly meant to have the pivot point for the curve moved from there. So, I have no idea how this happened. It's as though the book assumes Maya is going to work. except the writer of this text knows Maya is an incredibly temperamental program and it doesn't always work, even when it should-- as evidenced by the following line when it comes time in the book to render the decorative box from before:

"14. Save your work, grab someone you love, and give them a hug."

When your textbook includes demoralizing lines such as this when it's trying to teach you how to do something-- when the text itself is inaccurate to the point of hair-pulling frustration-- then something is terribly wrong.

It's not to say that these tutorials are absolutely impossible; I'm sure that I'd probably understand things better if I as able to take a lot more time on each given section, and if I wasn't so easily confused by the text. It could even just be terrible reading comprehension skills on my end-- who knows? Or the text is just not set up in a way that's beneficial to my form of learning. I did learn a few tool shortcuts, however, and I'm getting a lot better applying flat textures to surfaces. I'm absolutely terrible with multi-surfaces meshes, as we'll soon see with my poor excuse for a wagon. Still, Maya stopped fighting me when applying textures directly to planes! So, progress? I also did learn how to use CV Tools despite failing in this instance to continue past one. so, at the very least, I did take away a few lessons from this particular project.