Understanding Drupal core?

Question

I know there is Pro Drupal Dev for doing dev work on top of Drupal, but does anyone have suggestions for best places to look to understand the insides of Drupal?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I found it most beneficial to create themes and develop my own modules to get a feel for the internal structure of Drupal. Pro Drupal Development was very helpful, as was just reading through some of the code itself (starting at the hook level and working downward).

Answer 2

... just wonder, would not stepping though some of the code with Xdebug be helpful?

Answer 3

This post by eaton does a pretty good job of explaining how Drupal works, if that's what you mean.

Answer 4

Pro Drupal Dev is a great book to learn how to interface with Drupal, and by learning how Drupal works from that end will tell you a lot of how it works inside.

If you mean learning how to use Drupal's core effectively, there's a book titled 'Using Drupal' by a lot of the lullabots which will tell you how to set up a lot of items.

And then behind there, there's a lot of good stuff at api.drupal.org - dig in and look about and see how things are cross-referenced.

And finally, dig into the code and see what's going on yourself.