The Craig Anderton Big Book is great if you already use Cakewalk but want ideas to use it more efficiently. It is essentially a combination of some of his older books on Sonar and expanded versions of the weekly tips he posted in the Cakewalk forum and covered in his monthly Sound On Sound column. In short it's not a good overview but you do get a lot of deep learning about a multitude of Cakewalk features.

The +++ Sonar Reference Guide +++ is the last user manual pdf file published by Cakewalk one month prior to Gibson shutting Cakewalk down. For some reason BandLab doesn't include the pdf file as part of their Cakewalk by BandLab download.

The reference guide is also available as an online resource +++ HERE +++

Another free resource is +++ Cake TV +++ which is a product video series developed in house by Cakewalk staff. It's similar in nature to the videos offered by PG Music.

To me, the best introduction to Cakewalk is the +++ Sonar Explained +++ video series by Groove 3. For $23.33 US (it's on sale right now, normal price is about $30 US) you get a series of 49 videos that fully cover the DAW in 5 hours and 30 minutes. I suggest purchasing the videos as a 1.1 GB download then you can view offline or on a portable device like an e-reader, tablet or cellphone. You watch whenever it's most convenient to you. Each video is fairly short so you can break up your watching into small chunks.

Jim Fogle - 2025 BiaB (Build 1128) RB (Build 5) - Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk Sonar - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home