Angela Byron

I never reviewed a technology book before that I studied from. All the books I wrote about have been either fiction or non-fiction that I read or studied for my school. But I didn't have any formal schooling related technology, at least not on the coding level. (We did some basic HTML and XML when I studied for my MLIS, but by the time I got there I knew all that.) So when I sat down to write a "review" about rel="nofollow" target="_top">Using Drupal* I realized that I have to use different criteria than usual for my reflections.

When judging a tech textbook first and foremost I should assess what I have managed to learn from it. The answer in this case is a tremendous amount. Right now though, I don't know how lasting my learning will be. That will depend on how much work I will be doing in Drupal and how much I retained in the first round of studying. As it was a library book, i.e. I have to give it back tomorrow, I tried to take as much note as I could. Nowadays I try to put every informational on the web, except confidential pieces, so you can find my notes on my blog here: chapter 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

I think that studying the book was very useful for me. I wasn't a total novice in using Drupal 6, so I can't say I learned everything I know from it. But I can say that my knowledge feels much more grounded now. And there was plenty of new information, tips, trick, modules for me in there. I enjoyed the clear style of the writing, the detailed explanations, the description of the processes and the screenshot that helped me along the way. My only regret was that halfway through the book the site accompanying the book went down and I still cannot reach it. I hope usingdrupal.com will come back, so I could reuse the code snippets from the book, without having to type them in.

The book had a lot of authors, most of them are members of the team at Lullabot. Let me spell out all of their names, that I couldn't do in the title of this post (hence the ellipsis there): Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, Jeff Robbins. Thanks to all them making for putting together an excellent resource. Too bad that by the time I was done with the book, that covers Drupal 6 , Drupal 7 came out and now I can start the process (almost) all over again.

* Here is the official descrption of what Drupal is: "a free software package that allows anyone to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website."… (mais)

Drupal is a popular open source content management system (csm) that flourishes because of some nice architectural ideas (basically a core and (often user developed) modules that add functionality to your website.

The documentation on drupal is not excellent, although there is an handbook online, maintained by the drupal community. Coming to terms with drupal is not as easy as it could be. Enter this book.

In a number of chapters cases are studied and very explicit help and explanation is given about how to setup drupal and what kind of modules are relevant. In due course one learns to understand drupal, the drupal site, the drupal community, and how to enhance your own website, or the website of your company. It is not a book that goes into much detail when it comes to programming, using css or javascript. It is not a book for developers.

The case approach has a number of drawbacks. First of all, not every reader is interested in the cases, which can make reading an entire chapter quite boring. Secondly, the book is not a manual. It can be challenging to find what you need to know while working on your website in this book. It is an introduction that assumes that you will start working on your own after reading the book, of a few chapters.

The book is ok, well written and precise, a good introduction to using drupal and the many modules. Having said that, it is boring at times too.… (mais)