Easy to Understand Drupal book | Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6

Excellant Start | Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 | David Mercer

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	• Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 David Mercer Packt Publishing, 2008 - 380 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Recommend as a buy for new users...

...as an introduction to Drupal 6 and especially those individuals intending to build a Drupal site.

While researching and learning about Drupal 6 I bought and used this book, along with quite a bit of information provided on the Drupal main site. It is now full of little post-it notes to pages I used or referred to constantly while building our web site.

One of my immediate feelings is it could have been quite a bit larger, especially at the retail price of $44.99 US, coming it at only 362 pages including the index. I did manage to get a 'two book' discount (25%?) as I also bought "Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5, by Hagen Graf, from Packt Publishing. I'll be using that sometime in the near future as I research and learn Joomla!-based web site development. Most if not all books also come in an eBook electronic version, and the Adobe .pdf of this title sells for $30.59 US on the Packt Publishing web site.

As a technical writer I can be a bit picky when it comes to a books structure. Beginning with the table of contents I really don't agree with how the book chapter and topics were outlined and structured. Chapter 1 Introduction to Drupal, and Chapter 2, Setting Up the Development Environment, were okay and indeed useful as it included site planning, and setting up a development instance to work from, something often overlooked in what I would define as a beginners book on site building. But Chapter 3, Basic Functionality, is where I begin to take issue. It immediately jumps into Third-party Modules, those developed and contributed by the Drupal community. I feel more could have been written first on the core Drupal modules and the functionality they provide, just my opinion, as I would have used a prior discussion on Drupal core modules as a segue into the Third-party contributed modules. The remaining topics on blocks and menus was indeed right on. Chapter 4 Site Configuration, and Chapter 5 Access Control, could also have been a part of or followed Chapter 1, as it directly applies to site planning, and having read it earlier on it would have contributed to a better set of site plans.

The remaining chapters begin to flow nicely together going from Basic Content in Chapter 6 and Advanced Content in Chapter 7 where it discusses vocabularies, taxonomy, and thesauri (spelling corrected), something I am quite interested in developing with our site. The section on the Content Construction Kit (CCK) was just a tease, as this Third-party module is so much more, and something you'll discover on your own once you start digging into it and using it. That said I do think it was good to include and hope to maybe see another volume dedicated just to using combinations of the CCK, Calendar, Date, and Views 2 modules, with lots of real world examples to reuse or learn from.

One last note on Chapter 7, the section titled Creating a Feature-Rich Page. I feel should have been pointed out better that this page is not a themed page, and the page code tested too as I found a typo on top of page 230; no opening table tag. I found other typos in the book as well and that will automatically drop my rating down a star; page 4, first sentence, now instead of no. Page 9, again first sentence missing a 'to' ... - not only do we not have to develop the entire site... Page 12, bottom of page, word reversal; Drupal has many of common the features used in social networking sites. Sorry but with text checking algorithms what they are today this is inexcusable.

The remaining chapters provide an initial entry into theming and advanced functionality like jQuery and I already have my eye on two other books related to Drupal from Packt Publishing, "Learning jQuery" and the forth coming release "Drupal Multimedia" due out in September 2008. I think I'm going to be quite busy for many months to come multi-tasking between reading and reviewing these books and actual site development for web applications with them, but this isn't work, it's fun!

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Easy to Understand Drupal book

This book has been wonderful. It is well versed and easy to understand. It gives the basics on Drupal and I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to set up a Drupal site. I am impressed with the author's ability to break down the basics in easy to understand sections. He takes it one step at a time and makes it easy to copy and initiate each section with lots of illustrations and hints.

Excellant Start

I was really struggling with understanding Drupal before I read this book. This book laid out what I needed to know in a step by step manner that was easy for me to understand.

For example, I was having a hard time understanding how I could reference a page of content. How do you know what node number it is anyway? This book explained it to me.

There are many more advanced topics that I am sure will come in handy as I use Drupal more.

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Strong in the material offerred, but I was looking for more...

This is a great book if you want to learn how to setup a basic site based on the Drupal content-management system. Based on the materials in this book, you will have a customized web-site running in a few minutes, and be ready to generate your own unique content for publication. You can put together a blog, or aggregate your (and others) news feeds quite easily. Unfortunately, the book isn't perfect. In order to make your site look less like a site based on a template you need to learn to manipulate the various "themes" available for Drupal.

And in this one respect, the book falls a little short. You are taught how to apply themes, but it would have been very helpful to include a chapter steping-through the manipulation of themes. While I realize this might have been a challenge, given the number of themes available, an example based on the default theme would have given readers the power to learn HOW to learn the other themes.

In the end, this book gives you about 90% of what you need to setup a really great, unique Drupal site. To bridge that 10% gap and create a truly unique site with this powerful software you'll definitely have to use the copious forum and documentation resources available at drupal.org. Also, although this book doesn't require it, you would do well to take the time to understand basic HTML and PHP scripting. If you are unfamiliar with them, Google can help you educate yourself quickly. Even basic knowledge of either or both will help your comprehension of the material.

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This book updates the bestselling Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites for Drupal 6, the latest, much improved version of this popular open-source Content Management System. Targeting readers with little experience in website design, unfamiliar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and with little to no experience of Drupal, it looks pragmatically at the steps needed from knowing you want a website right through to designing and building it like a pro, and then successfully managing and maintaining it. Experienced author David Mercer uses a friendly, engaging style that is clear and concise, allowing readers to advance rapidly until they can tackle any problem with confidence. Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible open-source CMS platform that empowers anyone to create a website or blog and is rapidly becoming first choice of people in the know. With this powerful tool you need not pay professionals to design a site; you can do the job yourself.

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