Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6
by David Mercer
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Book Summary Information
Author: David MercerEdition: Paperback
Published: 2008-02-01
ISBN: 1847192971
Number of pages: 380
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Book Reviews of Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6
Book Review: Recommend as a buy for new users...
Summary: 3 Stars
...as an introduction to Drupal 6 and especially those individuals intending to build a Drupal site.
While researching and learning about Drupal 6 I bought and used this book, along with quite a bit of information provided on the Drupal main site. It is now full of little post-it notes to pages I used or referred to constantly while building our web site.
One of my immediate feelings is it could have been quite a bit larger, especially at the retail price of $44.99 US, coming it at only 362 pages including the index. I did manage to get a 'two book' discount (25%?) as I also bought "Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5, by Hagen Graf, from Packt Publishing. I'll be using that sometime in the near future as I research and learn Joomla!-based web site development. Most if not all books also come in an eBook electronic version, and the Adobe .pdf of this title sells for $30.59 US on the Packt Publishing web site.
As a technical writer I can be a bit picky when it comes to a books structure. Beginning with the table of contents I really don't agree with how the book chapter and topics were outlined and structured. Chapter 1 Introduction to Drupal, and Chapter 2, Setting Up the Development Environment, were okay and indeed useful as it included site planning, and setting up a development instance to work from, something often overlooked in what I would define as a beginners book on site building. But Chapter 3, Basic Functionality, is where I begin to take issue. It immediately jumps into Third-party Modules, those developed and contributed by the Drupal community. I feel more could have been written first on the core Drupal modules and the functionality they provide, just my opinion, as I would have used a prior discussion on Drupal core modules as a segue into the Third-party contributed modules. The remaining topics on blocks and menus was indeed right on. Chapter 4 Site Configuration, and Chapter 5 Access Control, could also have been a part of or followed Chapter 1, as it directly applies to site planning, and having read it earlier on it would have contributed to a better set of site plans.
The remaining chapters begin to flow nicely together going from Basic Content in Chapter 6 and Advanced Content in Chapter 7 where it discusses vocabularies, taxonomy, and thesauri (spelling corrected), something I am quite interested in developing with our site. The section on the Content Construction Kit (CCK) was just a tease, as this Third-party module is so much more, and something you'll discover on your own once you start digging into it and using it. That said I do think it was good to include and hope to maybe see another volume dedicated just to using combinations of the CCK, Calendar, Date, and Views 2 modules, with lots of real world examples to reuse or learn from.
One last note on Chapter 7, the section titled Creating a Feature-Rich Page. I feel should have been pointed out better that this page is not a themed page, and the page code tested too as I found a typo on top of page 230; no opening table tag. I found other typos in the book as well and that will automatically drop my rating down a star; page 4, first sentence, now instead of no. Page 9, again first sentence missing a 'to' ... - not only do we not have to develop the entire site... Page 12, bottom of page, word reversal; Drupal has many of common the features used in social networking sites. Sorry but with text checking algorithms what they are today this is inexcusable.
The remaining chapters provide an initial entry into theming and advanced functionality like jQuery and I already have my eye on two other books related to Drupal from Packt Publishing, "Learning jQuery" and the forth coming release "Drupal Multimedia" due out in September 2008. I think I'm going to be quite busy for many months to come multi-tasking between reading and reviewing these books and actual site development for web applications with them, but this isn't work, it's fun!
Summary of Building 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. Targeting readers with little experience in website design, unfamiliar with PHP, MySQL or HTML, and with little to no experience of Drupal, it looks pragmatically at the steps needed from knowing you want a website right through to designing and building it like a pro, and then successfully managing and maintaining it. Experienced author David Mercer uses a friendly, engaging style that is clear and concise, allowing readers to advance rapidly until they can tackle any problem with confidence. Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible open-source CMS platform that empowers anyone to create a website or blog and is rapidly becoming first choice of people in the know. With this powerful tool you need not pay professionals to design a site; you can do the job yourself.Scripting & Programming Books
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