Now that Drupal 8 is one year old, you may be asking yourself: “What am I waiting for?”

In the last year, thousands of Drupal 8 sites have launched, including NBA.com, Nasdaq Corporate Relations, and Jack Daniels.

If you haven’t started your own personal, professional Drupal 8 upgrade, here’s a good reason to get going: the availability of excellent free Drupal 8 learning resources.

That’s what we’re going to highlight in this blog series, starting with the video course Introduction to Drupal 8, hosted by Acquia Academy. Once you sign up (basically name and email), you can reach the course here: Introduction to Drupal 8.

This course is a bargain, because the instructor is the Rod Martin, who has a talent for painlessly easing you into challenging technology topics. Those of you who have taken his courses on OSTraining know what I mean. Rod’s approach moves you down the tracks towards Drupal 8 mastery deliberately and methodically. He does not skip steps. His casual, comfortable teaching style says, “Trust me. You will understand this.”

In 15 short segments, Rod will take you through a high-level introduction to Drupal 8, some installation strategies and tools (including Acquia’s Dev Desktop), and a tour of the Drupal 8 interface. You can plow through it in one hour-long session or knock off a few segments at a time. None are longer than ten minutes, and most are considerably shorter.

When you’re finished, you can wade into deeper topics, such as Drupal terminology, layout and theming, even module development. But that’s getting ahead of the story. We’ll highlight some more advanced free courses in the next installment.