BuddyPress.org

BuddyPress is still young and so it doesn’t have the same kind of rich development guides as the much more mature (and widely-used) WordPress.

Since BP is a WP plugin, the basics of BP plugin development are the same as they are for WP. The system of hooks and filters is exactly the same (though of course the hooks themselves are different).

At this point in the BP project, I’ve found that the best ways to get started with plugin development are (a) to find existing BP plugins that do something similar to what you’re trying to do, and to learn by dissecting them; (b) to look through official resources like the ones Jeff posted above; and (c) to search through BP codebase itself, where I think you’ll find that many of the functions you need are quite well documented.