Please suggest a good book on Drupal

Question

Can somebody please suggest a comprehensive book on Drupal? It would be great if the book is available online (and free :) )

Answer 1

Free drupal ebooks.

Answer 2

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.

---

Using Drupal

With the recipes in this book, you can take full advantage of the vast collection of community-contributed modules that make the Drupal web framework useful and unique. You'll get the information you need about how to combine modules in interesting ways (with a minimum of code-wrangling) to develop a variety of community-driven websites. Each chapter describes a case study and outlines specific requirements for one of several projects included in the book -- a wiki, publishing workflow site, photo gallery, product review site, online store, user group site, and more. With Using Drupal, you will: Get an overview of Drupal concepts and key modules introduced in each chapter, with a bird's-eye view of each module's specialty and how it works Explore various solutions within Drupal that meet the requirements for the project, with details about which modules are selected and why Learn how to configure modules, with step-by-step recipes for building the precise functionality the project requires Get information on additional modules that will make the project even more powerful Be able to access the modules used in the chapter, along with other resources

Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices for building powerful websites. With Using Drupal, you'll find concrete and creative solutions for developing the exact community website you have in mind.

Answer 3

I find Pro Drupal Development easy to understand. It covers the following:

• Creating your own custom modules and themes
• Discussion on user management, sessions, nodes, caching
• Basic optimization
• Security
• Drupal + AJAX

Answer 4

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

IMHO, This book is quite easy for understanding, because author explains every aspect of creating the whole module. I think, this book is the most appropriate for a newbie.

Earlier I began to read "Pro Drupal Development", but,as for me, it appeared inconsequent. But it's just my own opinion.

Good luck.

Answer 5

I think the answer really depends from what you want to learn! A possible way to categorise the areas of learning relatively to Drupal is:

• Learning how to build sites by using out-of-the-box functionality and contributed modules
• Learning how to theme your site so that it offers a unique user experience
• Learning to develop addition functionality by mean of coding your own modules

From a very personal perspective, I never felt the urgent need to read books on the first two areas of expertise. I found online documentation to be good enough to allow me to learn how to do things (but read further down about theming).

Contrarily, I strongly felt I needed books if I wanted to learn how to code the drupal way (i.e. by integrating my functionality with the entire system, rather than tossing it on top of drupal "somehow"). I articulated my views on "learning Drupal" in this other thread, but here's the bit regarding books:

IMO if you are new to Drupal it might be worth to invest on a couple of books. Books provide that logical structure and learning sequence that you can't have by jumping from one site to the other, following a screencast here and a how-to there. My top three: Learning Drupal 6 module development is a book very well written, with a smart progression of topics, it actually guides you to writing a few modules with increasing complexity. It is a good reading to quickly get an idea of how drupal works. Pro Drupal Develpment is the book for Drupal. It is quite dry and - although it has examples of code all along - I like it more as a study-book / reference text. Be sure to get the second edition as the first one deals with Drupal 5, which is going to be obsolete soon. The only noticeable shortcoming of Pro Drupal Development is javascript (introduced in a very hasty way). JS and Drupal is a wide topic, and for that purpose I like Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery better as the first book I mentioned, this book is also project-based (i.e. You learn things in relation to the needs to implement a project).

You can preview Pro Drupal Development here, if so you wish.

Pro Drupal Development contains also essential information on how theming works from a coding perspective. Although the information provided is geared towards coding, I found that part of the book was quite complementary to the online documentation, and therefore I felt it to be pretty useful.

As I never really read books on theming and site building I can't recommend any specifically. By simply browsing them in a book store or downloading the sample chapters, I found however that the books from PACKT publishing are genearally of a good quality, and structured in a project oriented way.

HTH!

Answer 6

I always have 'Pro Drupal Development' at hand when developing drupal site.

Answer 7

'Front End Drupal' is a great book for theming, and a good complement to 'Pro Drupal Development.' There is also a lot of good documentation at drupal.org/handbooks if you are looking for free and online.