New to Linux & Python (within a year), but long time developer on Windows.

Love kde. Super interested in kde5, but for work I'm on kde 4.13.3 (Kubuntu 14.04).

I'm here looking for information about where to find current (fall 2014) examples/tutorials/advice:

• Extending existing functionality for panels and groups (as found in the grouping desktop).
• containment widgets (a widget to hold other widgets)
• dashboards

I looked around and most of what I'm finding is dated 2009ish, so I figured I'd ask to see where the best starting point is for me jumping on so late in kde4.
Also when I search, I find a lot of documentation on end users changing configurations, but with what I'm looking to do, that keeps leading me through to a number of solutions that are about 90% what I'm looking for.

Right now I grabbed Plasmate. I'm good with using python and learning something else.
So if anyone can point me to some good current resources (blogs, tutorials, current working examples, etc), I'd appreciate that very much

While i'm not sure how much of those can be written in Python, you will find the API documentation at api.kde.org.
For containments and panels, most of the existing implementations for KDE 4 are written in C++ I believe.

Unfortunately the only tutorials I'm aware of are on Techbase (techbase.kde.org).