Prerequisites, focus and outcome of the Magento 2 Coding Kickstart course

Welcome! I’m Mark Shust, and I’ve been a Magento developer for over a decade. While I picked up Magento 1 fairly naturally, Magento 2 was always extremely difficult for me, and the framework seemed so complex. After a lot of trial and error, I finally started picking it up little by little until I eventually became extremely proficient.

I wish I had a course to guide me when I started, so I set out to create the course I wish I had when I first began programming Magento 2. These complex topics are broken down into extremely small and easy-to-understand lessons.

The Coding Kickstart course covers the core fundamentals you need to become a proficient Magento 2 developer, so you can start to be productive much more quickly. You’ll learn about the app structure, how routing and controllers work, how to extend core code, dependency injection and interfaces, different design patterns and usages, ways to modify the page layout, and how to work with data. The course is geared towards backend development, but almost all of the concepts also apply to frontend developers, since you need to know how the core of Magento works before understanding the frontend.

This is mostly a video-based course. If there are code examples in a lesson, there is also a related link to the source code on GitHub, as well as a place to leave comments on the lesson. Some lessons have additional info and graphics below the video, so be sure to check those out along the way.

This course assumes you have experience working with PHP and some general web development experience. For this course to be successful, you also need a bit of grit and a lot of patience. Magento 2 is still very difficult, but this course aims to simplify the really hard and complex tasks that you can’t quite understand at the moment.

Make sure you have a Magento development environment up and running. If you do not already have one, check out my docker-magento project and the related course on M.academy for setting up and managing that environment. Don’t continue with this course until you have this development environment set up, as it’s very important.

If you have questions, you can leave comments directly on the related lesson. This keeps the context of the topic you are asking about, and I’m notified and try to respond to comments as soon as possible.