bookreview

Calling this book a "second edition" is more than a little bit curious, since there is no Drush for Developers (First Edition). I can only assume that the publisher considers Juampy's excellent Drush User's Guide (reviewed here) as the "first edition" of Drush for Developers (Second Edition), but that really minimzes ths book, as it is so much more than an updated version of Drush User's Guide. It would be like saying The Godfather, Part 2 is an updated version of The Godfather - which is just crazy talk. Drush Developer's Guide is more of a sequel - and (like The Godfather, Part 2) a darn good one at that.

O'Reilly's Programmer's Guide to Drupal, written by Jennifer Hodgdon is a solid book for Drupal developers of all skill levels. I'd argue that it is one of the better books for PHP developers wanting to learn more about Drupal. It provides a wealth of solid information on a nice array of topics that professional Drupal developers should know. It's not a long read (less than 100 pages of actual content), but the structure and variety of topics covered makes it a great reference for best practices and intermediate to advanced "what's the best way to do this?" topics in Drupal development.

It never fails - regardless of the skill level of the Drupal workshop that I'm teaching on any given day, the topic of Drush always sneaks its way into the conversation. Normally, it's because I have to quickly download a module to demonstrate something that has come up in class. Rather than navigating to the module's project page, I just quickly jump to the command line and do a "drush dl whatever" and hope that no one notices the witchcraft I just invoked - this inevitably results in the nerdiest student in the class perking up and wanting to know what the magic is that they just saw...

As the explosive growth of Drupal continues, so does the eco-system of vendors and products around it. Included is the plethora of Drupal books that continues at a somewhat unbelievable pace. It seems that there are at least two to three new releases each month. Unfortunately, in the rush to quench the tech community's thrist for Drupal knowledge, sometimes less-than-stellar books are being served up before they're fully baked (cooking pun #1).

Packt Publishing keeps churning out Drupal-related books - by my count they've published nine this year alone! One of their latest efforts is Drupal 7 by David Mercer . It's a basic "intro to Drupal" book based on Drupal 7 geared towards readers new to the platform. There are a number of topics in the book that are a bit unique, starting with a nice discussion about the GPL and the rules governing its basic usage. It's not something that is seen very often in Drupal books, and it a great introduction to open-source licensing. There is also a short section on Open ID that provides the basics without trying to go into too much detail.

It's pretty rare for me to read a Drupal book that I can't recommend to anyone. So rare, in fact, that this will be the first time I've done so while reviewing books for DrupalEasy. Before I go into details, I want to be clear about something: writing a technical book isn't easy. While I haven't written one myself (unless my Master's thesis counts), I have written my share of technical articles and I'm never surprised at how much longer it takes me than I originally imagined. This is mainly due to the difficulty to make my thoughts clear to a large group of people. Combine that with a topic as difficult as the Panels module and you've got quite a task ahead of you. While the idea behind panels is easy to grok, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details . Earl Miles ( merlinofchaos on drupal.org , and one of the very few to score "11" on CertifiedToRock.com ), the creator of panels, has stuffed every conceivable option and an unbelieveable amount of flexibility into the Panels suite of modules. As with many things in the Drupal community, this makes for something very powerful, but also something very time-consuming to fully understand and use - both in theory and practice.

At first glance at the title of this book, you might be tempted to think that it is not too much more than a reference guide to the complex Ubercart module. Surprisingly, you're only half right. While the authors, George Papadongonas and Yiannis Doxaras, do a great job of covering almost all aspects of the modules that ship with Ubercart, they also go way beyond that.

Several months ago Ryan Price interviewed Emma Jane Hogbin , one of the authors of Front End Drupal , for DrupalEasy Podcast 10. At the time I hadn't received a review copy of the book, so I made a mental note to check out the book based on the interview. Six months later, the folks at Prentice Hall were kind enough to send me a copy, and I was not disappointed. Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer have written Front End Drupal in a way that makes it a valuble resource for virtually anyone who uses Drupal in one form or another. The strength of the book lies in the fact that it explains core concepts and best practices of how sites are built in Drupal, with an empahsis on theming. Rather than writing a full-on review for a book that has already been reviewed more than a couple of times elsewhere, I thought that I'd provide a list of 10 things that this book covers really well.