For a Wordpress beginner, is it best to choose the Genesis framework or try a theme like Circles 4.1 first?

I would say learn WordPress in general first and then pick the best theme for each individual project, unless you decide that you want to pick Genesis as a framework for all of your projects. Have you had a chance to watch our Theme Development courses or Genesis course yet?

I love theme development, and the first course where i finally understand everything was here, the wordpress course development, now i develop themes with underscores and genesis, and really want to master both, as when a client demand something for dev, is usually one or other, and they are bothe interesting i have begin with themeforest, before learning dev, but now i avoid if i can, as there is some bad themes, i only trust the big ones, enfold, the X, avada... You can set up your first sites with genesis child themes, or a theme like enfold, and then learn theme development with genesis you have lot of themes, built on the framework, so easy to tweak, when you don't want to make custom dev. They sample starter theme is also very nice and i use it to dev custom themes

Genesis is really bloated for most purposes. I would suggest skipping the track right now and watch the Theme Development course, then if you have Pro account check out the WordPress + Foundation course. Once you have those under your belt use a starter theme instead of a framework, something like Underscores or Bones.

If you want some more advanced functionality built in then try Roots. Make a few themes on your own then decide if you really want a framework like Genesis or Thesis to dictate how you develop. I personally like to keep things as minimal as possible.

I was searching around for Genesis in the forums and I found this thread.

Here's some Treehouse related courses that have come out since this was posted:

Genesis Framework Foundations

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/genesis-framework-foundations

Genesis Theme Development

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/genesis-theme-development

I agree it's bloated, but then again so are things like Bootstrap and Foundation.

I've started working with Unsemantic (a fluid grid system that is successor

to the 960 grid system from Nathan Smith):

http://unsemantic.com/

.

Even that grid system I had to cut down and tweak a bit to get it to be mobile first responsive.

Wish there was a course on how to adapt one of the free Unsemantic based themes to my needs.

Even something like a "here's the way to generically add multiple (many) widgets to customize any existing theme" course.

Mostly I've had to rely on this page (and most of the tutorials off the internet seems to be variations of this content):

http://codex.wordpress.org/Widgetizing_Themes

In response to John Burkhard, make sure you understand browser support for something like flexbox. It's great, but if it can be tricky to get it to work across all browsers. Also, I think frameworks can help a lot. A lot of work has been done to make frameworks robust and well supported. Why create extra work for yourself, especially if you're newer to something like developing Wordpress websites?