Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition [Paperback]

John K. VanDyk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 21, 2008 | ISBN-10: 1430209895 | ISBN-13: 978-1430209898 | Edition: 2

Widely praised for its in–depth coverage of Drupal internals, bestselling Pro Drupal Development has been updated for Drupal 6 in this edition, and provides are even more tricks of the trade to help you further yourself as a professional Drupal developer.

Assuming you already know how to install and bring a standard installation online, John K. VanDyk gives you everything else you need to customize your Drupal installation however you see fit. Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition delves deep into Drupal internals, showing you how to take full advantage of its powerful architecture.

What you’ll learn

• Find out how to create your own modules, develop your own themes, and produce your own filters.
• Learn the inner workings of each key part of Drupal, including user management, sessions, the node system, caching, and the various APIs available to you.
• Discover how to optimize your Drupal installation to perform well under high–load situations.
• Gain the knowledge needed to secure your Drupal installation and other best practice techniques.
• Learn to integrate Ajax into and internationalize your Drupal web site.

Who this book is for

Web developers maintaining and creating sites with Drupal. It is assumed that you already know the basics of Drupal and are able to install and bring up a basic installation. This book takes you deeper into the internals of Drupal and teaches how to tweak and modify it in order to create that perfect web site. Simply put, if you are working with Drupal, you need Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John K. VanDyk has been a Drupal developer since 2004. In 2005, he organized the first Drupal conference in Antwerp, Belgium, with Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. John 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; 2 edition (August 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430209895
• ISBN-13: 978-1430209898
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.4 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #216,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 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.

Format: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 ([...]) 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

Format: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

Format: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

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book on Drupal API Coding with PHP July 9, 2009

By Russell Brooks

Format:Paperback

Drupal's online documentation leaves something to be desired. It is so difficult to find detailed and complete, step-by-step, online tutorials of exactly how to customize Drupal via its API using PHP. Because of this, my first Drupal rollout was a little hodgepodge - some CCK work, combined some piecemeal code mined from online, combined with contributed modules to do other things, even [dare I say] a few module hacks. Nowhere could I find straightforward A-to-Z instructions, "Here is how you create a Module. Here is how you make that Module create Nodes, Forms, and Blocks" and so on. This book does that with flying colors.

I initially powered through "Leveraging Drupal" from Wrox Press in a few days. Certainly helpful in some areas, but that book is very high-level - remaining largely in the browser-based realm of Drupal customization. I really needed a book that delved deep into Drupal's API, had a tutorial-like style, solid working code examples, and remaining largely on the PHP level. Pro Drupal Development was that very breath of fresh air. Reading the chapters on Nodes and the Forms API immediately got me through several roadblocks and allowed me to get the project's timeline back on track.

Because of this book, I can now remove all the hodgepodge with CCK and hacked modules, and move all customizations entirely to the PHP level.