Typical Newbie starting List.

[Padraic]

I've never primed any other way!

Sugar is sucrose. Sucrose is a chain of fructose+glucose. The yeast splits sucrose into fructose and glucose first and then gobbles them both up.

Education is a dangerous thing

A complaint in the early days of modern homebrewing was that using table sugar in beer-making resulted in a "cidery" beer. The symptoms were that a beer made with table sugar that was added to the boil produced a cidery flavor that faded after several weeks in the bottle. Therefore the rule of thumb became 'avoid all table sugar'. While this is still a good idea when using malt extract, this old-(ale)wives tale is misleading. That defect most likely came from poor yeast due to a too low pitch, insufficient free-available-nitrogen, or a lack of other necessary yeast building materials in the wort. Table sugar can be used in small amounts with no harm and it is certainly cheaper to use for priming.

But Don't

Table sugar is okay for priming, cidery only comes into play when you use excessive amounts of sugar. It's more a problem if you used a kit and just use table  sugar for the rest of the fermetables instead of extract...

[Padraic]

It's not excessive sugar, it's the lack of malt, which means a lack of malt flavours.

My apologies, I should have said an excessive % of sugar...