Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition [Paperback]

John K. VanDyk (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430209895 | ISBN-13: 978-1430209898 | Publication Date: August 21, 2008 | Edition: 2nd ed. 2008. Corr. 4th printing

Drupal is the premier open source content management system available. It is used for high profile sites such as TheOnion.com and has been deployed by organizations such as NASA. Utilizing Drupal, you can create your own personal blog, a community driven site like Slashdot, or any other content oriented web site you can imagine. Building upon the success of the first edition, this second edition is updated completely to cover the newest version of Drupal, version 6.

Pro Drupal Development is a book geared to professionals that need to deploy and customize Drupal. This book delves deep into the internals of the Drupal system and teaches the reader everything they will need to know to deploy a highly customized and optimized Drupal installation. Every web developer looking to deploy web sites quickly to their clients while still being able to harness the power of an excellent content management system needs this book.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dries Buytaert, the founder and active core developer contributed the foreword to this book.

John VanDyk has been a Drupal developer since 2004. In 2005 he organized the first Drupal conference in Antwerp, Belgium with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. He has contributed several modules to Drupal, including the actions, workflow, publish, subscribe and pubcookie modules, and has been instrumental in the design of Drupal's Content Construction Kit. John's day job is as an entomology professor and systems analyst at Iowa State University, where he teaches undergraduate courses about insects. In his spare time, when not hacking on Drupal, John enjoys squash hunting and raising children.

Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 2nd ed. 2008. Corr. 4th printing edition (August 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430209895
• ISBN-13: 978-1430209898
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,544 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Overall Great Update, with Some Issues, October 2, 2008

By 

Robert H. Lowe Jr. "Rob Lowe" (Fort Wayne, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Paperback)

This is a review for the second edition, covering Drupal 6.

I have read only the first 3 chapters, but did read the 1st edition cover-to-cover.

The first thing to know is that while reading this, if you are working through the examples, you will want to have the Drupal API handy (http://api.drupal.com) as there are infrequent calls to depreciated functions such as variable_delete() instead of the current variable_del() that may make the learning process more difficult for people in the novice to early-intermediate range that aren't familiar with the API pages. So far the only other complaint I can make is that VanDyk's adherence to Drupal coding standards is spotty. I won't mention and specific examples of this as they don't make or break any of the code, but being a person who (tries to) strictly adhere to a given set of standards, found that to be a little bit annoying. Overall, this title would have benefited from an extra proofing by the sort of person who would read it in the first place.

This is the type of book in which a reader would benefit from an initial read-through before they would start coding. There are several front references that make more sense with better context.

As stated in general terms, this is my second reading of this book and find the updated version to be an excellent primer on the core pieces of Drupal, building modules and the theme system and have and will recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning about Drupal in spite of it's relatively few and small problems.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The essential Drupal coding book, October 9, 2008

By 

R. Gammon (NYC Metro Area) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Paperback)

If you're new to Drupal and just want to learn how to be an effective admin, this isn't for you.

If you're looking to customize Drupal by adding new functionality, new node types, advanced themeing the **you must get this book**.

Clearly written. Useful examples. Accurate. Detailed backmatter for professional Drupal coding practices.

I've used Drupal since v. 4.7, since 2005. My copy of this book's first edition is dogeared and well-thumbed. This second edition is even better, and I keep it right by my desk. It's helped me out of many a jam.

49 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars good but some issues, September 12, 2008

By 

M. Volmar - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Paperback)

I've been reading this book thoroughly. Normally I would give it 5 of 5 but...

I've found more than a few minor grammer errors (which are basically annoying and easily avoidable with careful editing), path errors in the text are a bit more troubling, and most disconcerting, some of the examples I am most interested in do not work, in fact, one in particular breaks my clean drupal 6.4 build. So far attempts to contact the author and publisher have been unsuccessful.

I am also rather suprized in the lack of
1.) "here is what v.5 of drupal did, and here is how it is in drupal 6"... type stuff than you might expect.
2.) Not too much time spent on explaining javascript use in drupal, other than jquery. Does using drupal 6 mean we always use jquery?
3.) the short xml-rpc chapter might disappoint people interested in web services with drupal.

Normally I buy a new book because I want to learn how to develop a specific programming solution. I read the book and work thru the relevant examples. Lots of times I start with the given examples and play with them to learn how things work. I couldn't do that with some key examples in this book - out of the box - with a clean drupal 6.4 build.

All in all I'd say efforts to edit this book and test examples was not as rigorous as I would expect from Apress. I'm working thru the Apress error reporting process, but how satisfying is that??

I'd still recommend this book, and I'm glad I bought it. But it might be good to also have the 1st edition, especially if you work on drupal 5 and 6 sites.

-1 star for general typos in text, general editing
-1 star for code example not working