TITLE: Why is it so difficult to find beginner books in Algebraic Geometry?
QUESTION [18 upvotes]: I don't understand why it is so difficult to find a really beginner book in Algebraic Geometry. Let's take for example Fulton's algebraic curves: An introduction to Algebraic Geometry. I've already heard on MSE and some students of my university saying that it's very concise and leave the proofs as exercises to the students, which personally I agree with. The last thing I've heard about this book is from a professor of my university (he is a little bit old now, but he was a very prolific researcher in Algebraic Geometry), he said that Chapter 7 is very hard to understand and has a lot of hard calculations and he never fully understood this chapter.
There are other introduction books, but they are very few and miss some things that a good introduction book should have.
I think this doesn't happen in Analysis and Abstract Algebra, for example. There are a lot of good introduction books with very detailed proofs, solutions to exercises and so on. I can't imagine a very good researcher in Analysis saying "I've never understood this chapter about continuity of the introductory book of the author $X$".
Why does this happen with Algebraic Geometry?  Is it maybe because this area is very recent? Or because there aren't many buyers to buy Algebraic Geometry books? Or because this area is indeed very hard to understand (and it will never have a good beginner book). 
Thanks!

REPLY [8 votes]: For full disclosure, I am hardly an expert in this area (indeed, I'm learning from Fulton, just like you), but I thought I'd throw in my two cents.
First, a recommendation for a "really beginner book:" Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms by Cox, Little, and O'Shea.  This is one of the friendliest math books I've ever read, and the emphasis on computation and algorithms ensures you see lots of concrete examples.  The prerequisites are very minimal: they don't even assume that you know what an ideal is!  Another useful resource, with many great visuals, is Donu Arapura's site.
Fulton is very terse, and sometimes he is a bit light on giving the reader intuition.  But one has to appreciate this style--every sentence has a clear purpose, with no extraneous remarks.  And many other books are so long as to be quite intimidating: just look at Ravi Vakil's nearly 800 pages of notes, or the countless, dense volumes of Grothendieck's EGA, SGA, and FGA.
But just because a chapter in Fulton is only a half-dozen pages does not mean that you shouldn't spend a week or more on it.  I think your understanding will be much clearer if you spend the first day working with simple, easy examples to get a feel for the definitions and theorems.  For me, it was often these examples that truly illustrated the meaning behind these definitions and results.  For instance, in Cox, Little, and O'Shea, I felt like every chapter included a reference to the twisted cubic.  Keeping this example in mind while reading the new material made things much more concrete and comprehensible.
From your question you sound a bit discouraged, so remember that a bit of motivation always helps, too!