Believe me, it's a doddle. The Jobo units are expensive if you buy them new, but no one in his/her right mind does that. Check ebay regularly to see what the winning bids are. So many people are moving to digital it keeps the price low. All Jobo unit come with a thermostatically controlled heater in the base of the tub + digital readout thermometer. You fill the tub with a few gallons of water and set the temperature. After 30 minutes or so (obviously depending on the start temperature) the water gets up to operating temperature and is held there with amazing stability. Each of the three or four chemicals sit in their slots in the bath, so you let them come up to temperature as well.
The developing jug with the film is attached magnetically at the base and is rotated around with half it's diameter always in the bath. Before you start adding the warmed chemicals to the jug you allow the jug+film to rotate around in the water so that by the time you are ready to start processing, the tub water, the chemicals and the jug containing the film are up to spec temperature. No problems whatsoever.
The Jobo unit does color film, slides, B&W film and even prints (depending on model) up to A4 size using interchangeable jugs. You just change the chemicals as you need them. What's so brilliant about this is there is no dark room. The jug in which you place the film (using the dark bag) is light tight but not water tight so you simply run an assembly line with each chemical poured into and out of the jug in sequence - For B&W film ->developer, stop bath, rinse, for color film developer, color developer, stop, rinse.
The key to getting great results with the Jobo is consistency in your process. the amount of time that it takes to pouring in the chemical and the amount of time to pour it out andd the interval between the first , second and third and so forth. After 5 or 10 rolls of film I could do everything consistently the same over and over again.
I started using B&W because there are only two chemicals + water rinse, and B&W has soo much room for error. That was easy. I then moved on to color film which has only one more chemical and then later to slides which adds an extra rinse step, but it's all the same - pour in, pour out.
Cheers,