No . They praise Ruby and some ObjectiveC . If you dont know ruby or objectivec , they dont want you . Its funny , they use like one of the slowest languages in the industry with one of the fastest . <| sep |> Thank you Ben , I will be sure to sign up for the courses as I will most likely be the only one in my team to work with magento . Also to answer your questions We ' ve got a standard development server , basic WAMP stack The whole setup process took about 1 hour and I ' ve started working after I ' ve deployed the sample data and set up the dev mode which took another hour or so . The Docs were helpful for the installation but not very helpful afterwards on Frontend Developer Guide as most of the things are poorly explained and the paths are different with the whole magento bundle being in the vendors directory . And also the examples are very poorly made and don ' t offer much information on how the whole linking between the controller , layout xml and the template phtml works and no example of how to setup and include a new block with a template and controller is offered .