Drupal Books

Matthew Saunders has reviewed Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6.

David Mercer has an easy conversational style of writing that makes reading his book a pleasure. He makes Drupal non-threatening and takes the reader from the most basic concepts through some of Drupal's more esoteric features. The book is broken into ten chapters plus an appendix on deployment.

In his review John Forsythe writes:

This book will take you through building several different modules, linking them together through hooks, and finally, creating an install profile to incorporate them all into a distributable package. Along the way, you'll find lots of useful tips, and links to relevant topics on Drupal.org.

From Matthew Saunders review of Drupal 5 Themes:

I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters which reinforced concepts that I already grasped providing very basic Drupal management and configuration and discussing what makes a Drupal theme. It goes on to illustrate setup and configuration.

From Larry Garfield's review:

Personally I think David has done a great job with it, but then I am biased; I was the tech reviewer for the book. :-)

From http://addingunderstanding.com a review of Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6:

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...

Read the rest on their site...

Finally, I received a copy of the latest Drupal 5 Themes book just right after Drupal 6 was released.

In general, the “Drupal 5 Themes” book by Packt Publishing is a lightweight for the light-hearted reference guide to get started and learn the basics of creating and understanding a Drupal Theme.

From the elements of a theme, to setting-up, working with theme engines, intercepting, overriding, and everything in between… it proved to be a great companion in the art of producing a Drupal theme.

Frankly, prior to receiving the book I already have some basic knowledge in producing my own theme. However, I was surprised to see ideas that I haven’t tried nor knew before I have browsed all 250 pages of this book.

Pre Order now scheduled to be available June 2008.

Language English
Paperback 250 pages [191mm x 235mm]
Release date Expected June 2008
ISBN 1847194443
ISBN 13 978-1-847194-44-2

From the book's website:

Walk through the development of complete Drupal 6 modules with this primer for PHP programmers, written specifically for Drupal 6 to get you started coding your first module.

Are you a Drupal developer looking to update to version 6? This book covers the new and updated APIs to guide your transition to Drupal 6. The new menu system, the Forms and Schema APIs, and many core revisions are covered in this book.
...

This book is written for PHP developers who want to add custom features to Drupal. You will need to know the basics of PHP and MySQL programming, but no experience of programming Drupal is required, although you will be expected to be familiar with the basic operation of Drupal.

Drupal 5 Themes, a 250 page paperback, gives people one thing they really want: a guide to creating a custom look for your site using css, some PHP code, images, and a little bit of effort.

It provides a bit of a review of existing themes and how to configure them for a custom look without any new code but also goes into how to create a completely custom theme.

Based on Packt Publiching's history we can only assume that it will be updated for future versions especially since theming has changed for Drupal6.

Long time contributors John VanDyk and Matt Westgate teamed up with support from lots of other community luminaries to produce the first book to really dive "under the hood" of Drupal. Pro Drupal Development, published in April of 2007 Pro Drupal Development (aka PDD) finally provided developers around the world with a thorough and well organized review of how to code and design your way to an amazing Drupal site.

At the time I read this book I considered myself to be a very knowledgable Drupal developer and I still learned a lot. The text is extremely well organized and detailed. The numerous flowcharts and diagrams really hammer home concepts that had been a fluffy cloud of disinformation before I read the book. This is "the bible" for any serious Drupal site admin, developer, and themer.

Pro Drupal Development A 375 page paperback from APress was the first deep dive into Drupal.
Published in April 2007.
Paperback - also available as a pdf.
ISBN: 1590597559