A great starting point for Drupal Development. With some PHP knowledge this book with get you started with module development.

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Product Description

Widely praised for its in–depth coverage of Drupal internals, bestselling Pro Drupal Development has been completely updated for Drupal 6 in this latest edition, and there are even more tricks of the trade to help you further yourself as a professional Drupal developer. Assuming you already know how to install and bring a standard installation online, John K. VanDyk gives you everything else you need to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition delves deep into Drupal internals, showing you how to take full advantage of its powerful architecture. What you’ll learnFind out how to create your own modules, develop your own themes, and produce your own filters.Learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you.Discover how to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high–load situations.Gain the knowledge needed to secure your Drupal installation and other best practice techniques.Learn to integrate Ajax into and internationalize your Drupal web site. Who is this book for?Web developers maintaining and creating sites with Drupal. It is assumed that you already know the basics of Drupal and are able to install and bring up a basic installation. This book takes you deeper into the internals of Drupal and teaches how to tweak and modify it in order to create that perfect web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal, you need Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition. About the Apress Pro SeriesThe Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder. You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard–won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16165 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 3.00 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

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Customer Reviews

Essential reading
If you want to get at all serious about taking Drupal beyond a simple installation, this book is going to be a massive help to you. If you're anything like me you'll come back to it again and again for reference and to try out some new ideas.

It covers all kinds of development areas such as building your own modules, the form API, themes, and even best practices. All this kind of stuff can be found online, but it's a big help to have it all clearly explained in one place. Sometimes you just need someone to guide you through the maze of options that Drupal offers.

Much of the book isn't for the faint-hearted. You need a good working knowledge of PHP and some MySQL. Most books start you off nice and easy, but here the early chapters are very much a leap into the deep-end. There's a certain amount of reliance on just accepting fairly esoteric Drupal stuff until it's explained more clearly later in the book.

The book also comes with plenty of examples, which you can download for free from Apress. These really help you get your head around some of the trickier ideas (I found one or two of the examples didn't work as described - but to be fair there are some errata by the author on the Apress site).

In summary - this book is an excellent buy if you want to take Drupal to the next level but don't know where to start.

Informative but disjointed and rather dull.
The book is not very paletable in the first 250 or so pages. Have you ever read a page and thought... "What did I just read. I didn't take any of that in" and you have to re-read sections a few times to start to understand things. This occurred often (30% of the first 250 pages being incoherent I'd say) and was compounded sequencing errors where things didn't get discussed in the right order. The copy editors should have picked up on this and helped improve the readability of the text (awkward sentence construction). Functions were called in code, then eventually explained some 50 or so pages later. Things of this nature.
As the book progresses it gets better because you've covered more ground. I found the chapters on Taxonomy, CVS and JQuery to be the most lucid. Appendix B also contains some valuable online references that should help you get going too.
Had it not been for these things and the fact I feel I've learnt a few tips on caching techniques and security issues along the way too, I would have given this book two stars because of how arduous the book was to follow.
I felt particularly irked to by the cop out on P271. What a waste of paper and time of the reader, giving an example you were told you shouldn't follow because it was flawed.
It is informative, but more of a dull reference than a Recipe book or a meaty example that gets built over course of book, either of which I would have preferred as a beginner to Drupal. It is the kind of book you'd need to read at least twice to get the best out of it.

Helped me understand all the different pieces
there is much information on the web about Drupal, lots of good bits of specific information; as a experienced developer, but no experience of Drupal, I found it like being a "detective" trying to piece together a puzzle, i knew the sort of thing I wanted to do but couldn't quite find all the information in one place to tell me how to do it. I was just about getting there when I decided to bite the bullet and buy a reference manual. What a difference it has made, I can highly recommend this book. its well laid out and talks you through all the powerful features of drupal in a thoughtful sequence. It has helped fill in lots of gaps. Drupal is a powerful, flexible product with lots of ways of dong things, that makes it very confusing when you first come across it. its easier to learn something when there is only one way to do it or you are led through the options, this is what this book does very well.