Advanced level learning for Magento [closed]

Question

The main question would be, how do you people get advanced understating of core Magento?

In particular there are a few subjects that preoccupy me the most:

1. Cart/payment/checkout process. Quote/order entities and related, their processing on front and admin.
2. Core models: product, customer, order, quote and related.

There is always the good old resort of going into Magento code and learn from it. But because Magento is a highly complex and abstract platform this takes lots of time.

How could you speed this up?

By example there is this nice book from Magento themselves "Magento for Developers: Product Configuration and “Composite Products” Functionality" by Andrey Tserkus that gives good understanding on composite products and custom options. This is golden!

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Learning Magento went like this for me:

1. First start with a bunch of internet tutorials that always take you from beginner level and get the basics.
2. When I need to resolve a certain problem find lots of articles that give you some info and a few code snippets. These code snippets sometimes they work sometimes they don't. When using these it usually goes by trial and error.
3. The last solution, dive into Magento code, reverse engineering, look for how Magento does things and try reproduce functionality. However, this takes lots and lots of time.

Question, is there any "reference level" documentation for Magento? Books, articles, sites or whatever to give understating of core Magento? Resources of advanced level to explain the principles of the core?

Of course, I don't want to pay thousands of $ for that, the free stuff is best.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This is kind of broad and opinion based. But I will give it a try.
The best way to learn Magento (in my opinion) is by trying to solve specific tasks.
yes, tutorials are nice to go through, but they won't help you much when you have small business specific tasks. It will help you only get a big picture of how things are done.
The first thing you should do when trying to solve something, is to look online for other people with the same problem. There is a high chance that someone had the same problem as you have.
Of course you may stumble upon solutions that don't work for you. Magento came out over 6 years ago and some code may not work in newer versions. But you can at least get an idea from the code snippets you find.
Also the learning curve for Magento is pretty steap, but I don't see a way of overcoming this.
You can find good sources in here of course, also on the magento forum if you get passed over all the spam in there.
There are also nice blogs from community members that might help (order is random):

• http://alanstorm.com/category/magento
• http://vinaikopp.com/blog/list/
• http://inchoo.net/
• blog.amasty.com/
• http://excellencemagentoblog.com/

The list is far from being complete.
I also strongly recommend Vinai's book Grokking Magento. Everything in there is explained for 5 year olds.

And not to forget the User giude and Designers giude.

Answer 2

For More Advance Level I have found this PDF which more focus on the Programming.

1. Magento 1.8 Development Cookbook

2. Magebook

3. makandracards

4. quizlet

Above are the Good Books for learning Magento. you can also refer this books also.