Great deep-dive into Drupal 2010-08-26

Reviewer: Susan Mildrum

As someone who is new to Drupal, but not to databases or programming, this was an invaluable tool to help me understand the capabilities of Drupal as well as how I might extend them to meet my own needs. Being careful to do all the examples, and munge them a bit on occasion to see if I really understood what I was doing, it took a few weeks to go through this book cover to cover.

Having a good understanding of PHP syntax as well as basic SQL are prerequisites for this book. As soon as I got to Chapter 2 I realized I needed to back up and go through a PHP book before continuing. Working through the exercises in turn helped me to better understand PHP.

Very highly recommended book for anyone who is going to seriously work with Drupal.

Kindle edition - very flawed 2010-05-15

Reviewer: Makiko Itoh

This is not about the actual contents of the book, but the way the Kindle edition is done - namely, very poorly. There are no chapter marks, so of course you can't click on the chapters in the Table of Contents to navigate to that chapter. Not only that, the Table of Contents is just copied from the print edition - complete with the original page numbers! Very confusing and annoying. Given that the price of the Kindle edition is almost the same as the price for the print edition, you're better off with the latter really. A really poor job by the publisher - and for a tech reference book no less. Even the free novels available for the Kindle from Harlequin and such have properly marked chapters and a navigable table of contents. Harlequin beats Apress for tech savvy - imagine that!

No chapter markers on Kindle edition. 2010-05-05

Reviewer: Kevin Michael Mangan

There are no chapter bookmarks on the Kindle edition.
No shortcuts in the Table of Contents.

This is a reference book; I often want to jump to a certain chapter quickly. Search really doesn't cut it for this. I made my own chapter bookmarks, but it took forever and was kind of ridiculous. Even most of the cheesy sci-fi novels I read have chapters marks.

And for nearly the same price as the printed version... com'on Apress...

An excellent reference! 2010-04-30

Reviewer: Rob Crowell

I'm currently starting day #2 hacking on drupal. Because I picked up this book last night, day #2 is going much better than the first.

I spent the first day building my own custom login block, violently ripping my hair out and crashing my browser with the insane number of tabs I had open to [...]. After sleeping on the problem and digging into this book first thing in the morning, I've been able to identify several places where I just wasn't able to piece together the 15000 hooks, function overrides, form_alters, and template options that make drupal so trivially "easy to extend".

This book helped put all those disjointed ideas together in my mind. I'm feeling rather like Neo at the moment, gazing into The Drupal and starting to see blondes, brunettes, and redheads instead of inscrutable nested theme_hook arrays, bizarre drupal_get_form rendering behaviors, endless template cache refreshes, and random characters scrolling down my screen at different speeds.

It's hard to tell whether this book is that good, or whether drupal is really just that bad, but in either case this reference helps in a 5-star manner. I highly recommend spending a day cursing the creators of drupal while trying to implement something simple without touching this book, and then take a step back and give this piece of pulp some serious love.

It'll make life worth living once again!

Good, if it's what you're looking for... 2010-04-24

Reviewer: A. Wilson

This book is good (not great) and only if you're looking for very specific information. Install standard modules in Drupal and the book become irrelevant quickly...