Drupal Books

Excellent

There are lots of sites online offering Free PDF Downloads of these many great Drupal books (and even some videos that people have for sale).

While you certainly can quite easily find those options they are not really a sustainable choice for the community as a whole. The book authors get paid based on the number of books sold, so downloading the copies of the book (if you haven't purchased the book) decreases the revenue for publishers and the payments to authors and overall decreases for Drupal book options in the long run.

There are lots of great free resources like the handbook on drupal.org and if you look at the revisions there it is often the case that the people who are ultimately paid to write Drupal books got their start and continue to play a big role in writing documentation that is available for free.

I'm the author, Lynn Beighley, on Twitter as @lynnbeighley. (Somehow my correct last name went missing for a week or so, but it's back now.) I'm not reviewing the book here, so much as contributing some insight on the intended audience.

The Publisher's comments I found on Powell's site (http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780470556115) do an excellent job of summing my book up:

Book: 

Drupal For Dummies

People have been asking for this for years. Finally, it's here. Drupal for Dummies may or may not be a worthwhile book (some topics just aren't meant to be written for dummies) but maybe they'll get this right.

There is a site slowly being built up at http://drupalfordummies.com/

Aaron Winborn reviewed the book Cracking Drupal.

One choice paragraph:

I know that's a cliche, but when I first learned about Greg Knaddison's book (greggles in Drupal-land), I'd assumed it would be aimed primarily at Drupal contributed module developers. By the time I finished the excellent book about Drupal security, I realized it was an essential read for anyone connected with developing, theming, or maintaining a Drupal site.