Crafting is extreamly different between WoW and FFXI.
You obviously have played FFXI and know the crafting system. You have to know your recipes (usually print out huge recipe lists online). Then, gather the materials (buying them outright for the most part). Then, you have to synth on a certain day, facing a certain direction and at a certain moon phase for the crystal you're using.
After all this, you still have a chance to fail and lose some or all of your hard-earned crafting materials and only get a skill up about 1 out of every 5 synths.
Compare that to learning a profession in WoW. You train in that profession, you train in various recipes that you can get at your skill level. When you open up your crafting window, it shows you all the recipes you know, what's required for them, how many of a certain recipe you can make with the items you have in your inventory and the "level" of the item (as in, the color of the item listed determines how often you'll get skill ups from it, to put it simply).
A yellow or orange item in your crafting list will get you a skill up just about every synth. You never, ever "fail" a synth, so all the items that you bought or gathered go to good use skilling yourself up. If you want to make something for someone else, there's never a chance of failure.
Its so much easier and less worrisome in WoW I sometimes wonder how I ever got two crafts to 60+ in FFXI.
Edited, Thu Sep 8 14:46:00 2005 by Chadness