Good beginners material/advice on Drupal

Question

Hi everybody,

I'm learning Drupal and whould like to ask you about some good material for a beginner on this subject. Any book, website or article is welcome.

I whould like to hear to any good advice for someone like me, which is just starting to know Drupal and CMSs in general.

Currently, I'm using as my basic source the official website of the project.

Answer 1

I started with this book on Drupal administration: Drupal 6: Site builders solutions . I liked it and from there I moved on to the following books for module development and advanced usage:

• Building powerful robust sites using Drupal
• Using Drupal
• Pro Drupal development

All 3 books have a good mix of module development, the theme layer and the API.

Answer 2

Learn By The Drop has a lot of good screencasts, if you're into that. Here's the archive.

Answer 3

I got started with Drupal using Lullabot videos. Beats the heck out of reading textbooks.

Videos are great and the quickest for learning the basics of Drupal. Once you are familiar with the platform read textbook others have mentioned: Using Drupal and Pro Drupal Development.

Answer 4

You can use Drupal for a lot of things and in a lot of ways, so it's hard to say which is the best for you.

If your aim is to use Drupal as a developer, I would say that you should use/get:

1. Pro Drupal Development, this was probably the single biggest help for me to learn how to develop with Drupal.
2. The Drupal API, to become a good developer, you must learn how to use the API. Drupal has a good online resource, where you can look up functions, view their source, see comments from other developers and more.

If you want to learn how to make Drupal look pretty, what we call to theme drupal you should:

1. Learn how to use starter themes a good place to start is the zen theme
2. Front End Drupal is an excellent book, and from it you can learn quite a bit about Drupal theming.
3. The theme guide on drupal.org is the official drupal resource for themers.

If you just want to learn how to use the CMS as an administration:

1. Using Drupal by the lullabot team is a great place to start. It will take you through the most basic things, and show what you can do with drupal without coding.
2. Lullabot.com is a good place for any drupal resource really, but they focus mostly on teaching stuff on different techniques for the most known modules.

Answer 5

To Learn Drupal, videos will prove to be your best friend. Its have been quite a time since I am using Drupal for site building, I find these videos very useful. Here is the list of some websites, which you should add to Favorites Bar.

1. http://www.lullabot.com/
2. http://gotdrupal.com/
3. http://mydrupal.com/drupal-beginner-videos-basics
4. http://usingdrupal.com/
5. www.drupaltutorials.org

If you use Twitter, You can contact these people for your drupal Queries.

Happy Drupaling :)

Answer 6

Check out Learn Drupal CMS.

Answer 7

If you are a coder already one way to learn is to fix bugs. Have a look at the novice issue queue. Fixing bugs will make you learn how parts of the system interact and work. It may not be the easiest way to learn but it will give you a deep understanding in the end.

As a bonus you will improve Drupal and get to know (and get known by) people in the community.

Answer 8

I started learning Drupal myself about a year ago. I had only been programming for a few months and had no PHP experience. I knew some js/jQuery so that was my only knowledge of the PHP syntax. I now work as a Drupal consultant, and the 3 major reasons why I was able to learn Drupal so quick was:

1. Pro Drupal Development. This book is absolutely great, if you want to develop with drupal. If you just want to make a few tweaks here and there, this will be a bit overkill. But for a developer, this is probably the best book you can buy.
2. Working on real projects. You can read all the books in the world, see screen casts etc, but it needs to be tested and tried. Facing those problem and finding a way to solve them, will force you to learn parts of Drupal you didn't know existed.
3. Code review. As a novice and even an expert too, we sometime solve problems in a poor way. Having peers, if possible experts review your code and give you feedback, is a great tool. It will show you both, what you did will and what could and should be improved. Drupal is a very customizable machine and you can do a lot things in many different ways. But being a developer, you don't just want to find a way, but the way.