Learning SAPUI5 for Beginners

Working as product manager for SAPUI5, one of the most common questions I receive is: “How do I learn SAPUI5?”. Often easy questions are not that easy to answer. In this blog I’m summarizing few important entry points which will lead you to the most relevant content. Let’s start with:

What is SAPUI5? See this short blog post to understand the value of SAPUI5:

What is the difference between SAP Fiori and SAPUI5? This is easy, see SAP Fiori and UI5 | The Difference in 100 Seconds. SAP Fiori web apps are build with SAPUI5. Hence you automatically have a consistent SAP Fiori design together with all enterprise qualities like security, accessibility or language handling, which you expect from SAP.

Developing SAP Fiori apps: SAP recommends the SAP Business Application Studio development environment as it comes with rich capabilities for developing SAP Fiori / SAPUI5 apps, e.g. the SAP Fiori tools. For building SAP Fiori apps, there are 2 ways:

• SAP Fiori elements: Using pre-defined page types you build your app using metadata. SAP Fiori elements is an efficient approach, following the SAP Fiori Design Guidelines
• SAPUI5 freestyle: Develop your app using SAPUI5 code, giving you full flexibility

Now, how do I learn SAPUI5?

• To understand where all this came from, read A Brief History of OpenUI5 and SAPUI5
• Documentation / tutorials
  • Official SAPUI5 documentation is in the SAPUI5 Demo Kit
  • Official SAPUI5 tutorials: Get Started: Setup, Tutorials, and Demo Apps Especially see the SAPUI5 Walkthrough tutorial which explains all concepts
  • Video tutorial Learn SAPUI5 In This Full Course (based on SAPUI5 Walkthrough) (5h)
  • SAP TechEd 2021 Hands-On Workshop Scale Application Development with SAPUI5
• openSAP courses*
  • Developing Web Apps with SAPUI5 for beginners
  • Evolved Web Apps with SAPUI5 aimed at intermediate to advanced developers but is also suitable for ambitious UI5 beginners
  • Developing and Extending SAP Fiori Elements Apps featuring a week on extending standard SAP Fiori apps
• Courses from SAP Training
• Books
  • SAPUI5 The Comprehensive Guide
  • Das neue SAPUI5-Handbuch (currently in German only)

Learning JavaScript

• Codecademy: JavaScript
• The Modern JavaScript Tutorial
• JavaScript Developer Documentation

I need help!

• SAPUI5 Troubleshooting & Debugging
• Get help and share your knowledge in the UI5 Community

Many learning resources are linked on SAPUI5 Community Topic Page

The above is a mix of SAP sources and valuable community content. I intentionally kept this short to not overwhelm a beginner. I hope the community would add comments to this blog with additional learning sources.

(*) The free openSAP online courses are a good source of learning, not only for SAPUI5. Please note that both SAPUI5 courses were created based on the development environment SAP Web IDE. Now SAP Business Application Studio is used, so following the hands-on exercises requires a bit of re-thinking.