Laugh? Me? I'm a BIG advocate of donuts as starter pools! You learn, you mess up, you empty and refill, and learn some more. We used a 15'x3' Intex for 3 years till we built the big pool.

Though I got to admit the pit bull tearing a pool up is pretty funny--as long as it's not MY pool...I'll bet HE was surprised to get a face-full of water.

The only difference with a small pool is that you use smaller amounts of chemicals to get the same results. Some things are different--you find vacuuming is tough. I suggest you invest it two extravagances:
1) a good test kit like PoolSolutions PS-234, or Taylor's 2006, or Leslie's Chlorine FAS-DPD Service Test Kit that uses FAS-DPD chlorine testing. Figure less than $100 for this, maybe as low as $70. But you have to buy them on-line.
2) A PoolBuster as your vacuum. Yeah, it's pricey, but all the other solutions for vacuuming your Intex are either so/so (like the garden hose powered ones) or really, really tough to set up--like to get your filter to power the vacuum. You have to be VERY inventive for the latter. The P/B was an impulse buy for me that I got darn lucky on. (No, I'm not a dealer--I'm a project manager for a C.R.O.--nothing to do with pools).

What's nice about these two things is if you decide to get a bigger pool, they will STILL be two of your most useful tools. I GOT the PS-232 (2 generations older than the PS-234) for the Intex, but the P/B wasn't on the market then. I got it in the 2nd year of my big pool.