If you’ve never worked with Magento, you’re probably wondering how best to get started. In my experience, the best way to learn is through real-world examples.

As a Magento developer, you’ll mostly be doing the same kinds of things: working with the catalog and orders, customizing themes, and much more. You’ll soon find that store owners’ requirements are often similar, and you’ll very quickly learn to identify which part of the system you need to customize.

I recently teamed up with the e-learning platform Skillmea. I realized that nobody in Slovakia was looking after the Magento community and that quality learning materials in Slovak were almost non-existent. So together we recorded a course for all of you who like Magento and want to start learning it. 

It’s more than 4 hours of material in which I start from the very basics and teach you enough to start building your own modules. I explain every concept through a practical example: together we build a working “Refer a friend and get a discount on your purchase” module.

So what exactly will you be able to do once you’ve completed the course?

  • install Magento with Docker
  • understand how the files are organized, so you know where to look for things – Magento contains more than 100,000 files
  • learn Magento’s basic building blocks, such as dependency injection, preferences, blocks, layouts, layout handles, …
  • add a new database table to the system
  • get to know how the classes that implement basic database operations work: Model, ResourceModel, Repository, Collection
  • create a form on the frontend
  • learn how to easily validate this form on both the frontend and the backend
  • look at security basics, namely how Magento implements a “content security policy”
  • know all the options Magento gives you to customize any part of the system without breaking anything directly in the core, so you can safely upgrade Magento in the future

… and throughout all of this, I’ll make sure you follow Magento development best practices. While we write code, I’ll occasionally show you some core code so you get an idea of what’s happening behind the scenes and why certain things are done the way they are. And at the end of the course, I’ll give you tips on where to find resources when you’re stuck and where you can go next.

When I started out in 2011, there was no comprehensive course like this. I had to rely on Googling and studying isolated pieces. Of course, that taught me a lot and made me a solid developer. But if I’d had a comprehensive course back then, everything would have gone faster, and I could have invested the time saved into working on real projects.

With this course, I’ve actually fulfilled a small dream of mine – I created it for my past self. Now it’s available to anyone who has looked at Magento for a few minutes and thought, “oh my God, this system is so huge it’ll take me forever to learn”.

Don’t worry! It is huge, but it’s also very logically organized. Once you understand these core principles, you’ll have a solid foundation to gradually start working on your own projects.

You don’t need to worry about the course becoming outdated as newer versions of Magento are released. These principles have held since version 2.0, and unless Magento goes through a fundamental change in architecture, they’ll stay valid for a very long time.

Enough writing. I think the best thing is to click the link below, watch the trailer, and then decide whether Magento is something you want to learn. 

https://skillmea.sk/online-kurzy/magento-tvorba-e-shopu (in Slovak)

If anything is unclear or you have more questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch. It gives me feedback as well as inspiration for more material for the Magento community.