Hang in there - Sonar IS a full-featured product, and there are tons of features.
These Cakewalk forums are a GOLD MINE of helpful folks, and even though they are user-forums, many of the Cakewalk staff members DO frequently pop in and help folks out or clarify things for all of us.
There are some included tutorials, and the Cake TV and ZILLIONS of other freely available videos, that address just about anything you could wish to do with Sonar, AND there are commercially available videos and really well-written books too. Almost ALL of these options are way easier to learn from than just trying to absorb the product documentation, though there is a BUNCH of good useful information there too - it's just hard to connect the dots with that by itself, sometimes.
One thing that will help you right away, is to understand how to search for explanations and tips in these forums, because the forum search mechanisms themselves are quite primitive and not at all usable.
Most of us folks here will use Google to search for Sonar issues and answers, but have learned to make the Google searches more effective.
I suggest you add the Google 'site:' search control parameter to your search strings, to tell Google to only look for pages on the Cakewalk site, and further, if desired, to limit the search to only look in these forums.
To DO this, here are a couple of examples that may help demonstrate this:
Example 1 - for finding specific documentation pages, type the following into your address bar and hit Enter (for Google Search or whatever your default search engine is):
site:cakewalk.com documentation sonar step sequencer velocity
The above will search the cakewalk.com website for Sonar documentation on working with the velocity settings for the Step Sequencer. For a more general set of results on using the Step Sequencer, just drop the 'velocity' from the search string.
Example 2 - to search these Sonar forums for threads/posts about drum maps, type the following into your address bar of a browser tab:
site:forum.cakewalk.com drum map
So, with either of the above, just change the parameters at the end as desired, to search for documentation or forum threads/posts for whatever you happen to be struggling with, and that will go a LONG way to quickly getting you answers without having to spend hours looking for needles in haystacks - both search methods will greatly cut down time needed to find many answers for things you are having trouble with.
And, post threads if you cannot find the information you need, and you will quickly find that these forums have a BUNCH of really dedicated and helpful folks that will bend over backwards to help you figure stuff out. The one thing I would add there is that there is a general hope/expectation that you will be actively engaged in the threads you post, and that you also are making an effort to work at getting up to speed on things by reading/watching/trying as well. But in any case, again, lots of available help in the forums, in addition to the other mentioned options above. :)
Welcome to it - to do basic recording and creation of midi tracks - both for synths and for drums, you CAN get up to speed fairly quickly in Sonar, despite its great depth of features/functions. 'Record' is 'Record' no matter who's recording software you are using, and things like sequencing drums and editing audio and midi tracks are REALLY well covered with lots and lots of examples, so you will get up to speed and productive in a reasonable amount of time - it's really about combining becoming efficient at learning and finding information on how to do things, as well as spending some time just working through the mechanics of DOING things a few times until you get the hang of it.
Bob Bone