This Thanksgiving Day in the United States, I have something special to appreciate: our son John Phelps West arrived in Walnut Creek, California on the afternoon of 16 October.

Johnzo weighed 9lbs, 11oz (~4,400 grams) and measured 23 inches (~58cm). The doctors had to repeat his length to ensure that they had not misheard. In addition to old standards such as “the Wild West”, the nurses liked to call him “Big John”. He currently prefers to go by “Johnzo”.

Most people say that he looks just like me, and I respond that I sometimes act just like him.

The names John and Phelps (no relation to the famous floating slacker) reference our common ancestor John Jay Phelps. In fact I am John Phelps West III, but I couldn’t bring myself to name Johnzo the fourth. But we can still call him Quatro. It doesn’t seem to appear on his Wikipedia page, but I always heard that John Jay Phelps was the first person to circumnavigate the globe in a boat that he owned.

Pending the results of a typing proficiency exam, Sitecore has already offered Johnzo employment in the technical, marketing, and operations departments.

All of our friends and family members have been extremely generous, making this transition in our lives as easy as possible for us.

To you, he probably just looks like any other baby. But to us, despite the Colbert ear and gorilla toes, he’s absolutely perfect.

Sitecore published the Cache Configuration Reference:

“This document describes caching features of the Sitecore Web Content Management System (CMS). Developers and administrators should read this document to optimize caching, which can improve solution performance, reduce server load, and increase system capacity.”

I updated my post that links to the best Sitecore documentation to include a link to this new resource.

Like any Web Content Management System (WCM or CMS), the best way for a developer to evaluate Sitecore is to build a prototype using the product. The best way to learn Sitecore is to attend at least the Sitecore .NET Developer or Sitecore HTML Developer training (the latter focuses on XSL). If you choose HTML training, then you should know HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. If you choose .NET training, then you should also know XML, ASP.NET, C#, and Visual Studio. And it never hurts to know a little about Microsoft SQL Server. But first, schedule a live Web demo of the product with Sitecore.

Do some research before attending training, working with the technology, or involving any information and system architects, users, business analysts, or other parties in the prototyping process. Spend as much time as you can afford reading about Sitecore. Check out the Sitecore Web site and the Sitecore Developer Network (SDN), especially the SDN forums. Manage your profile and sign up for newsletters on the Sitecore Portal. If you are a Sitecore partner, check out the Sitecore Partner Network (SPN).

Before architecting a solution, I think that developers should read through at least these in approximately the following order:

• The Content Reference manual.
• The Data Definition Reference manual.
• The Presentation Component Reference manual.

Further reading before installing Sitecore:

• I wrote another post about installing a local instance of SQL Server, which is the most convenient option.
• The Sitecore Installation guide, including system requirements. I would read a little about the .zip installation to learn more about the system components, which include a file system, an IIS ASP.NET Web site, and supporting relational databases.
• The Release Notes, which address known issues.
• Sitecore requires specific Internet Explorer Configuration.
• If you use Windows XP and have already configured an IIS Web site, then see this page on SDN.

For some reason, organizations often want to start by configuring the production servers. I would first focus on the development environments, then test environments, then production content management, and finally production content delivery.

You can get the latest Sitecore setup executable from this page on the Sitecore Developer Network, and you can get the Starter Kit there as well. If you are a Sitecore partner, you can download the Nicam demo site from the Sitecore Partner Network. Customers can contact Sitecore for access to Nicam. The Starter Kit and Nicam are useful for demonstrations and (to some extent) education, but neither follows best practices, and neither should form any basis for production solutions. If you run into any trouble installing Sitecore, see the Installation Troubleshooting guide, or contact your regional Sitecore office.

Use the cookbooks to implement what you’ve read:

• The Content Author's Cookbook.
• The Data Definition Cookbook.
• The Presentation Component Cookbook (especially the section, “How to Create a Visual Studio Web Application Project”).

If you want to use XSL, see the Presentation Component XSL Reference.

For information about Sitecore Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs), see:

• The Content API Cookbook.
• The Data Definition API Cookbook.
• The Presentation Component API Cookbook.
• The Sitecore 6 API documentation.,

Most Sitecore developers really appreciate NET Reflector from RedGate.

If the above topics don’t cover what you need, check additional resources listed in this post that contains links to the best documentation, common forum topics, and other resources. These should be particularly helpful:

• The Client Configuration Cookbook.
• The guide to Reusing and Sharing Data.
• The Rules Engine Cookbook.

You might want to review various blogs about Sitecore. Lars Fløe Nielsen maintains this list of current blogs relevant to Sitecore.

Partners and customers can access the Sitecore Support Portal at http://support.sitecore.net.