Customer Reviews

Beginning Drupal 7 (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was very happy with this book and highly recommend it to anyone needing to get started with Drupal. Even if you have little or no experience with developing websites or other CMS packages, this book will give you a great start. It was a very quick read with lots of visuals and illustrations, and included ample information to get you on the fast track to developing websites using Drupal. The book covers everything a novice needs to know to get started, and presents it in a very organized fashion. It was a real "page turner" for me.

I've been developing desktop database applications for 15+ years (as a full-time IT Manager, and as a night/weekend consultant), but have been doing more work with websites in recent years. I have developed a few simple websites, and my first CMS experience was with Joomla. But after trying WordPress, I quickly converted the site I had in Joomla over to WordPress, and all web development since has been with WordPress.

The manufacturing company I work for full-time is in the process of developing a new corporate website. After looking at many expensive enterprise-level CMS packages (SiteCore, Kentico, etc..) we decided to go open source, primarily because of the lower hosting costs and we wanted to own 100% of the source code to our new website. After many hours of researching options, we decided to use Drupal as our base. Since my CMS experience has been primarily with WordPress, I needed a book to learn the basics of Drupal, and to help reinforce our decision to use Drupal before we started the development of the website.

This book will help me as I manage the developer(s) who will be developing our new website, and I look forward to reading "Foundation Drupal 7" and "Pro Drupal" next!

As a new Drupal user I found Beginning Drupal 7 to be very useful for learning the basics.

Some of the features I found most helpful:

-Detailed instructions for installing Drupal
-Well organized chapters about the basic elements of a Drupal site
(e.g. menus, users, blocks, themes, etc..)
-Author suggestions for modules
-A detailed case study to explain the process
-An appendix about integrating social networking

The book didn't go into too much detail about custom themes or e-commerce, but there were chapters for each. Overall a great starting point for newbies!

This was a great help. Information at the Internet is not so ordered and clearly explained as this book.
Even if Drupal 7 is still in a release candidate version this book helps with the new concepts and way of working Drupal 7 brings.

However, I would wish for more detail with: The views module, Webforms module and maybe a little of multimedia support (image and video galleries, image uploads for users).

Kindle edition looks great!

Fairly well-written book with many step-by-step examples, however, they are also the source of my frustration as many don't jive with the updates to the Drupal.org site, specifically the chapter on downloading and installing themes. Too bad we can't have free access to the book changes after making the initial monetary investment.

As a long time web developer but newbie to Drupal, I found Tomlinson's book delivers with a great structure that walked me through the basics. The final chapters on administering the site and site building methodology are spot on. I found some of the example sections, particularly Panels and Theming, to be quite out of date with the current version of Drupal. If you are not comfortable sorting through the complexities yourself you might be frustrated.

Also, the errata section for the book on the Apress site is unfortunately useless. I totally understand that the book was done early and there will be discrepancies - why not fix the chapter errors and publish them to the site? Their failure to help us book purchasers out will give me pause before buying from this publisher.

Even with the caveats, I am really glad I got this book, and I feel ready to build a basic Drupal site and am eager to get started.

I have just started learning Drupal and found this to be the best book for me.

I was very excited to receive this book after only two days. I started reading almost immediately and thought I would finish with a strong and useful knowledge of Drupal. First off, Drupal 7 was not yet officially released at the time which was my mistake but the general rules for Drupal could still be applied. I did the best to translate everything into Drupal 6. I learned a few things but for some reason I did not really get into this book. It appears to be written in a rush without proper editing. There are numerous spelling and grammatical errors, a duplicate screen shot, and far too many screen shots in fact. The information could have been compressed to at least 2/3rd of the book's size.

I guess I have to find a better source to learn the basics of Drupal since the author's enthusiasm did not rub off on me...

Drupal is becoming the standard in open source CMS (Content Managment Systems) today and Drupal has just (or will very soon) the latest release to version 7. There are some interesting new features in this new version but the basics are pretty much the same from the previous version (version 6.x).

Learning Drupal cannot be rushed and really needs to be understood in steps and depending on what steps are taught, it can make it easy or alot harder to really understand the power of using Drupal. The author Todd Tomilson does a great job of explaining Drupal to beginners the right way in terms and examples that can be easily understood and used in student's own work and projects.

The book first goes into the basics of the core of Drupal and its components and then managing content. Teh different content types and url pathing is discussed as well. Then the author goes into managing users and permissions and then the somewhat difficult topic of taxonomy. After that the author goes into how to develop the look and feel of you CMS website with menus, themes and modules. These topics are the building blocks of any Drupal site and are covered in detail with really nice examples.

The rest of the book covers more intermediate topics such as views, panels, etc. And then the author goes into a really interesting case study (chapter 15) and really shows a site from start to finish. I really liked this part because it gives you the steps on how to create your own site and you can follow along after you already have a good understanding of Drupal.

The author overall does an excellent job of bringing up the newbie to Drupal up to speed and getting them ready to create their own dynamic CMS website.

A great buy and highly recommended.