Resources — where to go from here.
The wiki on this site is a starting point. For real depth, these are the people and projects that taught me — and will teach you more than I ever could.
Michael W Lucas — FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS
FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS are the best ZFS books ever written. Period. MWL writes like a human being, explains the why behind every decision, and covers the real-world gotchas that the manpages don't. If you read nothing else about ZFS, read these two books. They apply to OpenZFS on any platform — not just FreeBSD.
Allan Jude & Klara Systems
Allan Jude co-authored the MWL ZFS books, is a core OpenZFS contributor, and runs Klara Systems — a FreeBSD and ZFS consulting firm that contributes upstream code to the project. If you want to understand ZFS internals at the deepest level, follow Allan's talks and Klara's blog. They are the source.
BSDCan — Ottawa
The annual BSD conference in Ottawa, Canada. The ZFS talks at BSDCan are consistently the best in the industry — practitioners sharing production experience, not vendor pitches. Recordings are available free online. If you can attend in person, do it. The hallway track is where the real learning happens.
OpenZFS Developer Summit & Call for Testing
The OpenZFS project actively solicits testing from the community. Release candidates are posted with call-for-testing announcements. If you run ZFS — on any platform — participate. Report bugs. Test RCs. The project is only as strong as the people who use it and report back.
OpenZFS documentation
The official OpenZFS docs, manpages, and GitHub wiki. Dry but authoritative.
When you need the precise syntax for zfs set or the exact behaviour of
zpool replace, this is where you go.