Customer Reviews

Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide

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(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.

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.

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.