Beginning Drupal (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) Review

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Beginning Drupal (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) ReviewKnowing near nothing about Drupal, I wanted to find a book that would give me the big picture and help me develop a nuts-and-bolts working knowledge quickly. I saw so many titles online that I went to a physical bookstore so I could carefully look at the books and choose the most appropriate one for my needs. I looked at many books, and scanned the Introductions and Tables of Contents of several promising ones. I chose "Beginning Drupal" because it had a great balance of concrete examples, theory, and discussion of the implications of making various choices in Drupal.
After I purchased the book and began to actually use it, it became quickly clear that Wiley Publishing had not only jumped the gun in publishing a Drupal 7 book prematurely, but several other things really soured the experience for me. There was no discussion in the introduction about the fact that the book was based on early alpha and beta versions of Drupal 7, and that the installation instructions would install Drupal 6 which is so different that the exercises in the book are more confusing than helpful. Still, I persisted, trying to find the Drupal 6 equivalents to the Drupal 7 examples in the book. (of course this was not mentioned on the cover either, or on the web site. As a matter of fact, the promotional materials misleadingly call Drupal 7 the latest version, but don't mention that it has not been officially released yet). After I hit page 100, I realized that the UI differences were not the only problem. The book was not only unclear because of the version differences, but because the writer apparently didn't have the benefit of a conscientious editor to make the language clear. The grammar was sloppy, but worse yet, the meanings of many of the sentences were foggy.
I did switch over to using Drupal 7 beta, hoping that would help. In fact, it did help with many of the exercises, but there were also far too many instances in which the examples were confusing because they were based on earlier versions of Drupal 7. I looked at the "errata" published for the book, but they barely scratched the surface of the errors in the book.
I really liked the unfolding of concepts as the book progressed, in that sense the design of the book was brilliant. But it was sloppily executed, and there were numerous instances in which avoidable inconsistencies prevented examples from working the way they should have.
In summary, I'd say that this book was a well conceived but so poorly executed and rushed to market. It wasted more of my time and effort than any other "how to" book that I have ever encountered in my 4 decades in the computer business.Beginning Drupal (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) Overview

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Drupal 7 Review

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Drupal 7 ReviewA lot of time has passed between when this book was written and today. That also means a lot has changed in the development of Drupal 7. Reading this book is like playing a guessing game of how the Drupal developers changed things between the Alpha version of Drupal 7 (against which this book was written) and the current release candidates and actual releases.
I can tell you that over 50% of the content in this book is either **wrong** or **irrelevant** unless you intend on using an old Alpha version of Drupal 7 in production (not a good idea). This book was clearly written in an opportunistic way to capitalize on the upcoming release of Drupal 7 without any regard to its relevance once Drupal 7 actually comes out. I for one think it's a shameful way to write books and even though I have never written a review on this site, I felt compelled to warn others. The author should apologize for wasting my time and the time of any other poor sap who spent hard-earned money on this waste of paper.Drupal 7 OverviewThe approach of this book has been revised and updated for Drupal 7 based on comments from thousands of readers. The book takes a pragmatic look at the steps necessary to get a website up and running. Drawing on years of writing experience, David Mercer utilizes a friendly, engaging style that is both clear and concise-perfect for the Drupal newbie. This book is for people with little or no experience in website design, people who are not necessarily familiar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and above all people with little to no experience in using Drupal.

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The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 Review

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The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 ReviewThis is the most complete and up-to-date Drupal book. It is a _big_ book, and contains information on topics that most other Drupal books skip such as:
* Project management,
* Test driven development,
* Command-line administration.
I've only just started digging in to the material, but it has already helped me on my project.The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 OverviewThe Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 is the most comprehensive book for building web sites using the powerful and extensible Drupal content management framework.Written by active community members and contributors (some of the "brightest and most innovative minds in the Drupal community," to quote Angela Byron, Drupal 7 maintainer), the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 covers the basics then quickly advances to in-depth exploration of the functionality and tools that make Drupal so powerful for building web applications. Just as important, this book provides the reader with a guide to participating in the Drupal community: an international, committed, rapidly growing community of themers, developers, and open source advocates who write the modules, test the code, and work ceaselessly to make Drupal great. The release of Drupal 7, with its dramatic improvements in usability and system architecture, will take Drupal to a new level of popularity, and this book will help give you the foundation and scaffolding to grow with Drupal.With The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7, you will be able to:
Plan and build a complete Drupal site with core alone.
Extend Drupal's functionality by selecting from thousands of modules.
Make your Drupal site look like anything you want with theming and jQuery.
Extend Drupal by coding your own modules.
Install Drupal in many environments.
Use essential tools such as Drush and Git to make your life easier.
Contribute to the Drupal community as an organizer or a coder.
Who this book is forAnyone who is serious about getting better at Drupal.Table of Contents
Building a Drupal 7Site
Essential Tools: Drush and Git
Building Dynamic Pages Using Views
There's a Module for That
Creating Community Web Sites with Organic Groups
Security in Drupal
Updating Drupal
Extending Your Site
Drupal Community:Getting Help and Getting Involved
Planning and Managing a Drupal Project
Documenting for End Users and the Production Team
Development Environment
Puttinga Site Online and Deploying New Features
Developing from a Human Mindset
Theming
Advanced Theming
jQuery
Introduction to Module Development
Using Drupal's APIs in a Module
Refining Your Module
Porting Modules to Drupal 7
Writing Project-Specific Code
Introduction to Functional Testing with Simpletest
Writing a Major Module
Drupal Commerce
Drush
Scaling Drupal
Spice Your Content Up with Tasty Semantics
The Menu System and the Path Into Drupal
Under the Hood: Inside Drupal When ItDisplays a Page
Search and Apache SolrIntegration
User Experience
Completing a Site: The Other 90%
Drupal Distributions and Installation Profiles
Drupal's Story:A Chain of Many Unexpected Events
Now You're in Business: Making a Livingwith Drupal
Maintaining a Project
Contributing to the Community
Appendix A: Updating a Drupal Site from6 to 7
Appendix B: Profiling Drupal and Optimizing Performance
Appendix C: Page Rendering and Altering
Appendix D: Visual Design in Drupal
Appendix E: Accessibility
Appendix F: Windows Development Environment
Appendix G: Installing Drupal on Ubuntu
Appendix H: Mac OS X Installation
Appendix I:Setting Up a Drupal Environment with the Acquia Dev Desktop
Authors
Benjamin Melançon
Jacine Luisi
Károly Négyesi
Greg Anderson
Bojhan Somers
Stéphane Corlosquet
Stefan Freudenberg
Michelle Lauer
Ed Carlevale
Florian Lorétan
Dani Nordin
Ryan Szrama
Susan Stewart
Jake Strawn
Brian Travis
Dan Hakimzadeh
Amye Scavarda
Albert Albala
Allie Micka
Robert Douglass
Robin Monks
Roy Scholten
Peter Wolanin
Kay VanValkenburgh
Greg Stout
Kasey Qynn Dolin
Forest Mars
Sam Boyer
Mike Gifford
Claudina Sarahe
George Cassie
Mike Ryan
Dmitri Gaskin


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Drupal 7 Module Development Review

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Drupal 7 Module Development Review(Full disclosure: The publisher of this book sent me a review copy)
This book will serve as a tremendously helpful introduction to Drupal programming for programmers. It does assume you know PHP, and warns you (or comforts you, depending) early on that there won't be much OOP here and there will be a lot of structured arrays. The chapters don't necessarily follow in order one to the next, and aren't explicitly linked one with another.
For programmers new to Drupal chapter one should be required reading. And while occasionally the book slips into "what's new" mode, for the most part the reader is considered a competent PHP coder but not necessarily someone fluent in Drupal programming.
The examples given throughout are mostly useful. One thing I hate about programming texts is when they show what the language/system can do with ridiculous examples. With the glaring exception of the Javascript chapter, this book does not stoop to such levels, instead giving real-world problems solved through the Drupal API.
The style of the book is nicely conversational. The overt humor is sparse, but at the same time you don't ever feel that you're sitting in a lecture hall. The authors seem quite well-versed in the material and aren't subjecting you to death-by-powerpoint-by-screenshot. They don't talk down to you, ever, guiding the reader through the API as a comrade. Even in the areas of security and best practice, when it would be easy to slip into browbeat mode, they resist, presenting facts instead of opinion and advice rather than orders.
The main problem I had with this book is that I feel there are parts missing. The book begins talking about how we'll use modern techniques, and mentions Drush, the Drupal shell, one of my favorite tools. And that's the last we'll here of it. Seriously. Even when the installation profile chapter says we can use profiles at the command line, we end up writing a command line PHP script instead of leveraging Drush. An oversight in the editing, perhaps, to mention it at all?
Also absent any real treatment is *contributing* rather than simply *developing*. A "10 minute git tutorial" appendix wouldn't have been out of line. There's no mention of how to be a good module maintainer, dealing with releases, submitting your module to drupal.org, or any such thing. While that's not necessarily within scope, such a discussion is noticeable in its absence, particularly when the community is perhaps the strongest thing about Drupal. Given the status of the authors as top-tier contributors, it's a curious omission.
There are some nitpicks, some spelling errors, wrong screenshots, and discussions of things (ie., drush) that just aren't there. No more, perhaps, than any other book of its size, and nothing that was too glaring or anything that would stop one in their tracks. We do occasionally slide away from coding standards (eg, after singing the praises of Doxygen comments earlier in the book, chapter seven contains no code comments at all), but it's nothing too big.
I was very happy to read through this book. It's well written by competent authors. It gets me excited to write some custom code of my own for Drupal 7. While there's not too much that will serve as a desk reference within the book (the authors are quick to point us to api.drupal.org, early and often), Drupal 7 Module Development is a worthy addition to the shelf and serves as a wonderful introduction to coding for Drupal.Drupal 7 Module Development OverviewThis book takes a hands-on, practical approach to software development. The authors, all professional Drupal developers and contributors to the Drupal project, provide accessible coding samples designed to exhibit not only the technical merits and abilities of Drupal, but also proper architectural and stylistic approaches to coding on one of the world's most popular content management systems. Every chapter provides fully functional code samples illustrating the APIs and strategies discussed in the chapter. With this foundation, developers can quickly build sophisticated tools on their own by making use of the strategies and techniques exemplified in this book. If you are a PHP developer or a Drupal user looking to dive into Drupal development then you will find this book an excellent introduction to coding within Drupal. Those with some Drupal experience will also find this an invaluable tool for updating their knowledge about the powerful new features of Drupal 7. Theme developers looking to extend their abilities will find this an accessible introduction to PHP coding within the Drupal environment. This book assumes that you are familiar with basic PHP programming, along with HTML and CSS. No experience with programming Drupal is required, although it is also a handy way for experienced Drupal developers to get up to speed with Drupal 7.

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Beginning Drupal 7 Review

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Beginning Drupal 7 ReviewI was very happy with this book and highly recommend it to anyone needing to get started with Drupal. Even if you have little or no experience with developing websites or other CMS packages, this book will give you a great start. It was a very quick read with lots of visuals and illustrations, and included ample information to get you on the fast track to developing websites using Drupal. The book covers everything a novice needs to know to get started, and presents it in a very organized fashion. It was a real "page turner" for me.
I've been developing desktop database applications for 15+ years (as a full-time IT Manager, and as a night/weekend consultant), but have been doing more work with websites in recent years. I have developed a few simple websites, and my first CMS experience was with Joomla. But after trying WordPress, I quickly converted the site I had in Joomla over to WordPress, and all web development since has been with WordPress.
The manufacturing company I work for full-time is in the process of developing a new corporate website. After looking at many expensive enterprise-level CMS packages (SiteCore, Kentico, etc..) we decided to go open source, primarily because of the lower hosting costs and we wanted to own 100% of the source code to our new website. After many hours of researching options, we decided to use Drupal as our base. Since my CMS experience has been primarily with WordPress, I needed a book to learn the basics of Drupal, and to help reinforce our decision to use Drupal before we started the development of the website.
This book will help me as I manage the developer(s) who will be developing our new website, and I look forward to reading "Foundation Drupal 7" and "Pro Drupal" next!
Beginning Drupal 7 OverviewA beginner's guide to creating and managing websites with Drupal 7.

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