Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional)

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What you’ll learn

Find 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 Series

The 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.

Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

good but some issues September 12, 2008
21 out of 24 found this review helpful

I've been reading this book thoroughly. Normally I would give it 5 of 5 but...

I've found more than a few minor grammer errors (which are basically annoying and easily avoidable with careful editing), path errors in the text are a bit more troubling, and most disconcerting, some of the examples I am most interested in do not work, in fact, one in particular breaks my clean drupal 6.4 build. So far attempts to contact the author and publisher have been unsuccessful.

I am also rather suprized in the lack of
1.) "here is what v.5 of drupal did, and here is how it is in drupal 6"... type stuff than you might expect.
2.) Not too much time spent on explaining javascript use in drupal, other than jquery. Does using drupal 6 mean we always use jquery?
3.) the short xml-rpc chapter might disappoint people interested in web services with drupal.

Normally I buy a new book because I want to learn how to develop a specific programming solution. I read the book and work thru the relevant examples. Lots of times I start with the given examples and play with them to learn how things work. I couldn't do that with some key examples in this book - out of the box - with a clean drupal 6.4 build.

All in all I'd say efforts to edit this book and test examples was not as rigorous as I would expect from Apress. I'm working thru the Apress error reporting process, but how satisfying is that??

I'd still recommend this book, and I'm glad I bought it. But it might be good to also have the 1st edition, especially if you work on drupal 5 and 6 sites.

-1 star for general typos in text, general editing
-1 star for code example not working

4 out of 5 stars

Overall Great Update, with Some Issues October 2, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

This is a review for the second edition, covering Drupal 6.

I have read only the first 3 chapters, but did read the 1st edition cover-to-cover.

The first thing to know is that while reading this, if you are working through the examples, you will want to have the Drupal API handy (http://api.drupal.com) as there are infrequent calls to depreciated functions such as variable_delete() instead of the current variable_del() that may make the learning process more difficult for people in the novice to early-intermediate range that aren't familiar with the API pages. So far the only other complaint I can make is that VanDyk's adherence to Drupal coding standards is spotty. I won't mention and specific examples of this as they don't make or break any of the code, but being a person who (tries to) strictly adhere to a given set of standards, found that to be a little bit annoying. Overall, this title would have benefited from an extra proofing by the sort of person who would read it in the first place.

This is the type of book in which a reader would benefit from an initial read-through before they would start coding. There are several front references that make more sense with better context.

As stated in general terms, this is my second reading of this book and find the updated version to be an excellent primer on the core pieces of Drupal, building modules and the theme system and have and will recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning about Drupal in spite of it's relatively few and small problems.

5 out of 5 stars

Excellent Book for Web Developer September 9, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful

Being new to the Drupal scene, I found this book very informative and helps me a lot to get up to speed.

I love the author's no nonsense approach. After giving a brief overview of Drupal in Chapter 1, I am taken into action by developing a module right away. I particularly love the facts that the author walks me through throughout the book by using very practical examples, flowcharts and diagrams. The book appears to cover lot of grounds, if not all, for Drupal.

I only read through a few selective chapters and now I already have a good grip in hooks, nodes, menu system and theme developments.

Sure you can learn on-line but nothing beats a good old-fashion medium by presenting all information in one single well-organized book. If you are a web developer and can only afford one book, make it this one. The time you save in learning pays for itself!

5 out of 5 stars

The essential Drupal coding book October 9, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

If you're new to Drupal and just want to learn how to be an effective admin, this isn't for you.

If you're looking to customize Drupal by adding new functionality, new node types, advanced themeing the **you must get this book**.

Clearly written. Useful examples. Accurate. Detailed backmatter for professional Drupal coding practices.

I've used Drupal since v. 4.7, since 2005. My copy of this book's first edition is dogeared and well-thumbed. This second edition is even better, and I keep it right by my desk. It's helped me out of many a jam.

5 out of 5 stars

Complete overview of Drupal for developers September 1, 2008
3 out of 8 found this review helpful

I already own the drupal 5 version of this book. The table of contents has not changed that much but more text was added to each chapter.

I can recommend this book to everyone who wants to have a better understanding of Drupal.

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