Looking for the ultimate beginners guide

Hello @HeadScratcher, I don’t have much time to answer in length right now. I just want to say two things.

  1. Such a glossary exists here and here. I’m not saying they are perfectly placed, I just wanted to point you to them.

  2. The Beginners tutorial is not perfect. A volunteer just as you or me decided to contribute it. Sadly he did never invest more time for a second revised version. I am fully aware of the problems of the Tutorial but it is incredibly complicated to write a good documentation (as you’ve proven) and I (as the documentation lead) am concentrating more on the User Manual part of the documentation, as this is the area every reader will end up eventually when looking for exact details.
    With that said, I would encourage you to help improve the Beginners Tutorial! You could revise the whole article or simply note down all things that bothered you so someone else has a list to work through. “Someone else” is the tricky part as you can imagine.

In general I can only agree with the others. Read the User Manual and experiment with the Tutorials&Examples available. Many volunteers have contributed great things over the last 12 months to make those places a very good source of information for openHAB users.

I’d like to suggest the following example as a starting point to understand a few concepts. Speedtest-cli Internet Up-/Downlink Measurement Integration
Fun fact: It is my first Tutorial I’ve posted here in the community (I’ve improved it over time). The tutorial includes many basic concepts you should know about. Be aware that it does not address Paper UI, Things, Persistence or Transformations - as these are imho advanced topics you can learn after you’ve made your way through the basics. Here’s how you should go at it: Read the tutorial, every time a term comes up you don’t know: Study the respective documentation article about it. The Tutorial for example quickly introduces an Items file -> Read the Items article and make sense of the shown content.

Good luck!