Beginner tutorials

Question

Hello!

I'm going to be building my own site on Drupal pretty soon, and I understand it is quite a deep learning curve to get it done right. Basically, I am looking for some documentation/tutorials online or on book that you could recommend to me by experience, that will help me from the start of development, right through to finish. I am looking to be building my own themes and doing everything manually so this has to be detailed enough to keep me on the right track in the development process.

Again I want to reiterate that I would appreciate posts from those who found tutorials helpful, and have not just google'd "best tutorial for Drupal" as I've tried that myself and the results did not help much! :P

Answer 1

If you want to get into custom development of Drupal, almost everyone recommends, for good reason, Pro Drupal Development. But if this is your first foray into Drupal, it might not be enough exposition. If this is the case, you might want to look at Using Drupal, which was written by some of the main contributors.

Answer 2

I found the most efficient for me and my team to be the detailed video tutorials, mostly from Lynda.com. For Drupal, they have 3 pacakges:

• Drupal 6: Essential Training
• Drupal 6: Online Presentation of Data
• Drupal: Creating and Editing Custom Themes

Again, this is also a matter of style, but I much prefer video tutorials with exercises when available :).

Answer 3

[...] and doing everything manually [...]

The most important point to learn is that you should not do everything manually because this will make things extremely complicated and un-maintainable (trust me, I've been there).
I can't recommend you any books or anything but I can advise you to look at the dev topics on drupal.org very (!!!) closely. Especially look into hooks (there are more depending on the modules) since they allow to jump into almost any functionallity and alter it to your needs. The "handbook" is a very good point and covers many topics you will need. Always skim through the comments since they are a very good ressource for in-depth info

It's hard to imagine when starting with Drupal how many things are already there in the form of modules. The possibilities seem endless. Sure, you will need to do some things manually, but these will involve adding bits and pieces to already exsiting functionallity.

edit: Don't know if you already found it but I feel like I should mention it: I advise to look into Zen. It's a "base theme" that you should base your own theme on. It is very popular and well docuemented and really helps you to get started. Hope this helps ;)

Answer 4

If you want to learn about building themes you should get Front End Drupal: http://frontenddrupal.com/, it will be a very helpful complement to Using Drupal.