Book Review: Drupal 7 First Look

Drupal 7 First LookSo, Drupal web app builders, Drupal 7.0 RC 1 Released. It’s coming soon to a development environment near you! So, who can help dive right in? The very well written drupal.org announcement mentions the updating your modules and updating your themes pages and the Coder Upgrade module. But curling up with a good book would be nice too. So I was eager to review Drupal 7 First Look by Mark Noble in order to see if it could assist me in systematizing my own approach to becoming familiar with Drupal 7 and preparing myself for “the big shift” as a Drupal developer.

A solid book to help you build Drupal and Ubercart based ecommerce website applications

Book: Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x

Link from drupal.org: https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-e-commerce-with-ubercart-2-x/book?utm_source=drupal.org&utm_medium=link&utm_content=pod&utm_campaign=mdb_002765

I am in the middle of several ecommerce website applications right now, so I need all the help I can get. So reviewing this book not only helped me but also served as an excellent acid test for its real world contributions to the hard working ecommerce site builder.

Another indispensable eWorkbook for designers from Emma Jane Hogbin

PHP for Drupal DesignersA couple of weeks ago I reviewed Emma Jane Hogbin’s new eWorkbook on Drupal theming. With PHP for Drupal Designers, we are going to have to make that a double: 32 pages with a few examples in PHP for designers, you may ask, what’s the big deal? The big deal is that with the info to be found in this condensed form, designers can learn how not to clutter their Drupal templates, developers can learn just what they really need to finally make good on separating coding from layout and styling, and multi-talented groups can learn the Drupal way.

Emma Jane Hogbin’s new eWorkbook on Drupal theming is no April Fools Joke

Emma gave out over 300 copies of her new eBook: Theming Drupal: A first timer’s guide, as a way of saying Happy April Fools day. So since you can still purchase the book for a very low price, I thought I would review it as a thank you note for my free copy.

Not only is this “Drupal theming the missing starter tutorial”, as characteristic of Emma, this 29-page book is geared towards a specific learning curve for a specific kind of audience (“Whether you want to build and sell your own designs, or you’re a newly hired designer at a Drupal Web development shop”). It even assures you get a brush up on web design and web designing software in general before diving into Designing for Drupal. The goals (p. 4) speak volumes:

Leveraging Drupal – the book

Well I really got into the idea of Leveraging Drupal (re-use) as opposed to building from scratch, so… I decided to write a book!

Leveraging Drupal http://www.amazon.com/Leveraging-Drupal-Getting-Your-Right/dp/0470410876

It merges all the stuff I have been on about, how to face the Drupal learning curve in the context of an ongoing real world example that starts getting the most out of Drupal 5.x, gets upgraded to Drupal 6.x (we have a good long look at that process, with non-trivial examples involving major contributed modules), where it really takes off, and then closes with a look forward to the stability and richness that is the exciting promise of Drupal 7.x.