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:
- Cart/payment/checkout process. Quote/order entities and related, their processing on front and admin.
- 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!
Learning Magento went like this for me:
- First start with a bunch of internet tutorials that always take you from beginner level and get the basics.
- 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.
- 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.