If you were the mentor of someone new to SharePoint where would you start to teach, developer, the world of SharePoint.
Where would you guide him first, in order for him to know what Sharepoint is all about?
And what tutorials would you recommend him to start developing his first Apps and workflows?
For me, I would prefer reading books, they make you more focused and they go in depth with you more than videos. For sure PluralSight are great, but you can get easily distracted and not knowing what they're talking about, plus reading a book on your laptop makes it easy for you to copy code snippets and paste them here so people can help you more. And it's not about which site to watch videos from.. there was a large number of videos on Youtube before the idea of PluralSight, but it's a bit hard to keep up watching videos.
If you're a beginner and would like to focus on the development side of SharePoint, then make sure to master HTML5 and JavaScript, anyway this is the first exam you need to take to become MCSD SharePoint Certified. After you become familiar with these technologies, get into SharePoint from end user perspective, you should know how to use it without thinking as a developer, understand what it offers, try to make stuff with it without writing code. Then it's good to know a little bit of Administration, know how to configure some service applications like Search and User Profiles, and understand their implications in your site collections. Then you should take it one level up and use SharePoint designer to create some workflows and understand this concept and what SharePoint Designer can do for you.
After all of this, try with applying some master pages for SharePoint, understand the themes, and when to use master pages, try to apply one for SharePoint and understand differences in design between all SharePoint Editions (Server VS Foundation). After you know this area, get into development and use what you know in SharePoint OOB, what you learned from JavaScript and HTML, what you knew SharePoint Designer can't do, and what designs you created for SharePoint and try to implement that in a Visual Studio project, like packaging your design, creating SharePoint columns, content types, list definitions, so on.
After you know that area, learn the App model, and see how things are transitioned from doing stuff the regular way in SharePoint 2010 to doing them in App model and how to provision everything using an App. That's how I would mentor someone to learn SharePoint Development.
Most of my learning as a beginner was from the courses on Lynda.com. These are the ones I started with:
SharePoint Server 2013 Essential Training
SharePoint Designer 2013: Custom Workflows
SharePoint Designer 2013: Creating Data-Driven Sites
SharePoint Designer 2013: Branding SharePoint Sites
These should give you a solid grounding in what SharePoint is and how to start building solutions with it.
Now that I'm at a more intermediate level and moving to advanced, I've benefited greatly from the courses on PluralSight.com.
Trust me when I say the subscription cost to these sites is well worth it.
