Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide [Paperback]

Tom Geller (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321619218 | ISBN-13: 978-0321619211 | Publication Date: December 18, 2010 | Edition: 1

Visual QuickStart Guides, designed in an attractive tutorial and reference format, are the quickest, easiest, and most thorough way to learn applications, tasks, and technologies. The Visual QuickStart Guides are a smart choice and guide the learner in a friendly and respectful tone. Visually presented with copious screenshots, the focused discussions by topic and tasks make learning a breeze and quickly take you to exactly what you want to learn.

The free and open-source package Drupal is one of the most user-friendly and popular web content management systems (CMSes) available. Sites built on it are highly visible and include The White House and Amnesty International. Its web-based interface allows those with little or no experience to create professional-looking sites quickly while its flexibility gives them access to such features as blogs, polls, and forums.

Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide uses plenty of screenshots and step-by-step instructions to walk a reader through the process of building a site using Drupal. To begin, the book details the process of downloading and unpacking Drupal, creating the MySQL database, and installing Drupal. It then moves on to explain the administrative interfaces, how to select a visual theme and create and customize content, and how to improve access to that content. Next the book walks readers through managing user accounts, customizing Drupal’s look and feel, and extending Drupal with modules.

Although Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide is written for beginners, it goes beyond the basic package to ease readers into  advanced topics. A glossary and cross-references throughout the book give readers complete possession of the concepts, vocabulary, and steps necessary to reach Drupal mastery. From start to finish, it’s a complete guide for getting up and running with Drupal 7.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Tom Geller (Oberlin, OH) is a full-time freelance writer whose recent clients have included Apple, IEEE, ACM, Nature.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Safari Books Online, and Lynda.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Peachpit Press; 1 edition (December 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321619218
• ISBN-13: 978-0321619211
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #64,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development > Web Services

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good, Manageable Task-Oriented Guide to Drupal 7, February 22, 2011

By 

Randy Fay "Randy Fay" (Palisade, Colorado) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

(Disclaimer: The book for review was provided gratis by the publisher.)

Tom Geller's new book Drupal 7: Visual Quickstart Guide is a concise, dense sitebuilder/administrator's guide to Drupal 7. It provides a pretty decent task-oriented overview of D7 sitebuilding and administration. It's a manageable size for almost anybody, about 210 pages of primary content.

Overall summary: The book does well what it sets out to do, which is provide a user-interface task-oriented introduction to Drupal 7 for sitebuilders and administrators (in a reasonable size package). That approach has innate drawbacks, but so does every other approach, right?

Praise:

The book is connected well to the community, and provides real-world techniques, not just "search drupal.org". He mentions great sources of information like drupalmodules.com, and suggests how to use d.o effectively, and mentions key "everybody knows about them" contrib modules that a new sitebuilder should know about.

It has great coverage of community issues. The appendix on getting and giving help is wonderful and thoughtful and so necessary in a book like this. It would be easy to leave it out when you're trying for an easy-to-manage book, but it was retained. Thanks. And the "Drupal Terms and Culture" glossary is great, although I'm sure it could be expanded.

Gripes:

There is a fair bit of oversimplification (as there almost has to be in a book this size). It tries to handle installation of Drupal on Windows, Mac, and Linux in simple step-by-step instructions... and of course that usually requires far more background than could possibly be provided in a book of this scope. Another example of oversimplification is installing a module directly from the UI. It works. But Tom chose wysiwyg module as an example, which requires advanced stuff after installation. And it doesn't mention that. But still, it's amazing that you can do a web-based module/theme install in D7!

There is occasional inaccuracy, but nothing huge that I noticed. (It's wrong about the default user creation settings being wide open, but they were changed a long time ago to "Visitors, but administrator approval is required". But I know about that because it was my patch. Overall, it seemed balanced, knowledgeable, and correct.

Most pages are half screenshots and half step-by-step walkthroughs of administration tasks. They take on almost everything in the D7 interface. The screenshots are painfully small in some cases, as if the book had been planned for a larger format.

Overall, a difficult job well done.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not for the technically competent, April 3, 2011

By 

Kenneth Ratliff (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

I have years of administration experience, dealing with most forms of popular php based web software. I was looking for something to tie it all together into a decent CMS, and I can't stand Joomla. Drupal had always had the reputation of being difficult to work with, so I started out by purchasing this book to give me a leg up.

I think the book is a little too simplified, and a little too unfocused. It spends far, far too much time dealing with how to install Drupal, and tries to cover far too many systems in doing so. I'd already had Drupal installed before I started reading the book, so I ended up skipping the majority if the chapter.

The other concepts it dealt with were also fairly simplified. It didn't directly answer anything I was curious about regarding Drupal, and I learned more from just poking around inside Drupal, than I did from reading the book. I ended up skimming the majority of it.

Now, I was a system administrator for a web host for a number of years, so I got more than a fair bit of exposure to web based PHP apps, so from that perspective, I may be being a bit unfair to the book. If you have very little experience, then the simplified level of detail will be good for you, it'll gently nudge you in the right direction and allow you to grow from there.

For an experience administrator? You're probably better off giving this one a pass. I purchased the Kindle edition because it was only 10 bucks, and I'm glad for that choice, my disappointment would have been greatly magnified if I'd ordered the full print edition.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Starter, May 24, 2011

By 

Lost in California - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide (Paperback)

I found this book to be a good primer. Wished it covered things a little more in depth. For a beginner it is a perfect book. For somone wanting to dig in a little deeper it leaves you wanting more.