I wouldn't ignore the tutorial example. It's a pretty good tutorial. Joel might want to update it, however.
ad_table works fine -- I don't think it's deprecated. List-builder is better, however. It's worth learning.
You're right, I don't believe you can search for bugs. You could look on Google, perhaps.
In response to your question, however, I don't remember much on ad_table. It looks like you're including no_sort in the SQL query, however, which would treat "no_sort" like a SQL column. That' wouldn't work.
If you look at the api-doc (under https://openacs.org/api-doc I believe) it will show you the correct format for ad_table. I imagine no-sort might be an option like -no_sort
