The Ultimate Magento 2 Developer’s Resource List (docs, tools, books, courses…)

6 min readDec 3, 2015

In this post, we’ve gathered the best resources about Magento 2. If you are looking for important information related to the platform, you will find the most reliable Magento 2 resources below. The article is divided into 4 parts: Learning Magento 2; The Real Magento Community; Magento 2 Extensions; and Magento 2 Virtualisation. The Magento 2 Developer’s Resource List will be updated with the appearance of new resources related to Magento 2.

The Ultimate Magento 1 Developer’s Resource List

Everything about Magento 2 on Firebear

Learning Magento 2

First of all we’d like to draw your attention to the Magento 2 Developer Documentation. It provides all the necessary information for getting started with the second version of the platform. Other topics are divided into groups for system administrators and developers. All Magento 2 basics are described here: Magento 2 Dev Docs.

Besides, there are a lot of qualified developers sharing their thoughts about Magento 2. For instance, Dale Sikkema tells about basic concepts of every Magento 2 extension on Alan Kent’s blog: A MINIMAL MAGENTO 2 EXTENSION.

Another important source of information on Magento 2 features and enhancements is Alan Storm’s blog. Here — The Magento 2 Object System — he sheds light on such important aspect of Magento 2 as Object System. There are 5 different posts related to the topic on the blog.

You can also check what Cool Ryan thinks about Magento 2. His website is full of useful content, and there are a lot of frequent updates. Concepts and architecture, Magento 2 customization, debugging, Magento 2 modules and plugins, dependencies, observers, and themes are among key topics described by Ryan. You can check all this stuff here: Magento 2 by Cool Ryan.

There is also a dedicated category on the Inchoo blog — Magento 2 on Inchoo. You can learn more about migration, benchmarks, payment gateways, Magento 2 logging, dependency injection, and frontend architecture there.

In its turn MageClass offers tutorials, screencasts, and the latest news about Magento 2. For example, you are invited to check articles about Magento 2 installation and debugging from the homepage of the website.

If you have a budget for learning Magento 2, then there is an official video course called Fundamentals of Magento 2 Development. You can subscribe here. A regular price for all 6 units during 90 days is $689.

Other useful Magento 2 resources and blogs:

Karen Baker knows a lot about Magento 2 and always shares useful posts in a blog. There are some useful Magento 2 articles about migration from 1.X to 2.0. You can find all these and other materials here: Karen Baker’s Blog
It is also useful to surf on StackExchange while trying to master Magento 2. Although it is not a Magento 2 resource, but there is a separate section related to the new version of the popular ecommerce platform. You can learn about Magento 2 on StackExchange here: Magento 2 tag on StackExchange.
Max Pronko is another prominent member of the community. We’ve already written about him in our Real Magento Community post, and his blog is also among top learning Magento 2 resources. You can find it here: Max Pronko’s Blog.
Mage2.PRO blog offers tons of useful Magento 2 tips, tutorials, and articles by Dmitry Fedyuk. You can find all the precious Magento 2 treasures here: Mage2.PRO.
On a certain stage of learning Magento, you will have to start practical explorations. That’s where Magento 2 Sample Modules will be useful. Grab them from GitHub: Magento 2 Sample Modules.
The Session Digital blog is also among reliable Magento 2 resources, since you can find a lot of useful articles and posts about the platform there. Hit the following link to dive deep into the world of Magento 2: Session Digital
Nathan McBride is a certified Magento developer with a huge experience and an interesting blog. Materials related to Magento 2 are posted here: Magento 2 on Nathan McBride Blog.
And of course we should mention the Head of Magento 2 Development and his blog among Magento 2 resources. Max Yekaterynenko knows a lot about the platform and shares his ideas here Max Yekaterynenko’s Blog
IBNAB is another reliable source of information about the second version of the platform. The company is famous for its extensions and other Magento projects. Additionally, there is a blog on the IBNAB website: IBNAB Blog.
Another useful Magento 2 blog is Ash Smith’s Blog.
And don’t miss Creare’s Blogs and Tutorials.
One of important actions widely used within the Magento ecosystem is the installation of modules. You can significantly improve the default ecommerce capabilities of the platform via third-party extensions. We’ve even have a book which describes how to turn Magento CE int Magento EE via modules. If you are not familiar with Magento 2 modules installation, check this post: How to Install Magento 2 Modules.
For more advanced coding tips check our Magento 2 Developer’s Cookbook.
Other vital Magento 2 resources are: Magento 2 GitHub Repository, Magento 2 Installation guide, Magento 2 Developer Hub, Magento 2 Documentation, Magento 2 Composer Repository, Magento 2 Sample Data and Official Magento 2 Code Samples, as well as Magento 2 Official Forum.
All recent Magento 2 news are published here and of course on our blog.
If you are looking for reliable Magento 2 tutorials, then we recommend you to check Magento 2 tutorials by Mage World.
And don’t forget about MageInferno, since it is a very useful source of information on Magento 2.
There is even a Magento 2 live chat among other Magento 2 resources.
If you are looking for a request flow, here it is: Magento 2 Request Flow.

Magento 2 Extensions

The first public release of Magento 2 opened tons of new opportunities for extension developers. As a result, you can find a lot of true open source projects on GitHub, and collaboration within the Magento community regularly generates new solutions. All this stuff is extremely helpful for the understanding of the new platform’s core concepts and building other Magento 2 extensions. The best examples are gathered here: The Best Magento 2 Extensions. Since there are always something new on GitHub, we constantly update the digest with new Magento 2 modules.

Magento 2 Virtualization

Magento 2 relies on MySQL 5.6, which is a problem for running it in such environments as MAMP and XAMPP if they support MySQL 5.5 only. While switching between Magento 1 and Magento 2, this will be a real headache, but you can easily fix the problem with the aid of virtualization and Docker. The procedure is described here: How To Create A Virtual Machine For Magento.

Tell about your favourite blogs and websites about Magento 2 in comments.

The Real Magento Community

The Magento community is extremely huge. Being the most popular ecommerce solution, it gathers both developers and merchants, as well as professionals and enthusiasts. Though all this mass was disconnected in the beginning, everything has been changed within last years. Today, Magento community is huge, powerful, influential, and friendly to its members, so you can always get maximum from your interaction with it. We explain how to do this in the following post: The Power of Real Magento Community. The most important resources are:

And don’t forget to check our Twitter list: Real Magento by Firebear

More resources soon…

Originally published at firebearstudio.com on December 3, 2015.