I’m very excited about Drupal and all this capability so I immediately got ahold of Matt Butcher’s “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development” as soon as it was available. I am quickly becoming a fan of Packt Publishing for a number of reasons. First is that they are incredibly quick at getting books on the latest and greatest to print. On top of that, they are doing a fantastic job of finding people who are right in the middle of the mix to do the writing. And finally, Packt gives back to the community. When a reader buys a Packt book that covers some open source technology, Packt donates part of the procedes to that project. In this instance, buying “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development” is not only a method for learning more about Drupal, it’s a way of contributing hard, cold cash to Drupal.

Matt Butcher is a consultant that does a lot of work with Drupal and so sitting down with Learning Drupal is a lot like getting Matt to sit down beside you and start working through module development. The book is pretty thourough and fills in a number of unfortunate gaps in existing documentation. I think it is safe to say that one needs to bring a knowledge of PHP, MySQL and such to the table – but Matt will provide everything needed as far as Drupal is concerened. (The homepage for his consulting company is a great Drupal resource in its own right.)

This isn’t a large book, especially by tech book standards, and so not everything is covered to great depth. But the approach is very hands on and focuses on getting things done and working. The fundamentals of how Drupal itself works and its own core modules are explained and any Drupal will be better off for the information. I like to think of this as a tremendous jump start for the aspiring Drupal module developer that will save a lot of time spent wading through the basics of getting started. This allows one to focus much more on the fun challenges and developing that potential great idea.

The second chapter is freely available to download in pdf format. This chapter is representative of the rest of the book and should give the reader an excellent opportunity to judge if the book is for them, if you don’t want to just take my word for it.

I’m continually more and more impressed with Drupal. For anyone who isn’t satisfied to sit on the side lines and watch it motor along, “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development” is the ticket to getting on board and having a part in driving the train.

Another review of this book made the front page of slashdot a bit back – and is the way of Mr. Ross – it offers up some excellent detail. A review over at Drupalib also offers up some nice insight and recomendations.

Title: Learning Drupal 6 Module Development
Author: Matt Butcher
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Pages: 315
ISBN: 978-1-847194-44-2
Rating: 8/10
Tagline: A practical tutorial for creating your first Drupal 6 modules with PHP.

It doesn’t seem like it has been 3 years since the Mambo dev team split and a new content management system, Joomla! was born. Over the last few years Joomla has grown to be very popular and has very strong developer and user communities. Joomla is extremely flexible and a wide array of extensions exist that allow the system to provide many different capabilities. In “Joomla! A User’s Guide”, Barrie North provides everything needed to get anyone up and running with a Joomla based site, even if they have little or no experience with creating web sites or applications.

The book is written with language and content squarely aimed at someone new to the tech side of building and running a web site. The language is very simple and even relatively basic terms are explained. As someone with some amount of experience working with software and the web, I didn’t find it to be tedious. North does not go on at length, but just gives the information necessary so that someone without the background will be able to keep up. He can also be rather sympathetic to the reader, encouraging them with things that he says can be difficult. That did get a little tiring at times, though I would imagine for his target audience these affirmations could be really assuring. If you are someone who just wants to get a jump on how Joomla works, I wouldn’t worry too much about this emphasis on the basic. The book is not overly verbose and so the more basic content does not seem to stretch on forever. North covers a lot of ground in what is a thin book in comparison to much of what seems to dominate the tech book market these days.

While North doesn’t wallow in the most basic material and explanations, he never moves on to the really advanced stuff either. If you are interested in coding extensions, or working with the core code, you wont find much here. If you would like a definitive guide with an explanation for every feature and option that exists in Joomla you wont get that either. What North provides is a guide to the most used and most useful information about how to install, set up and run a Joomla based web site. Probably the most advanced material in the book deals with building templates for customizing the look of Joomla. Along with instructions on working with Joomla itself, North also takes some time to also deal with how to generate traffic to a site. For some that chapter may be a bit uncomfortable, though North does a good job of laying out a basic explanation of how things work, as well as practices to avoid. There is a matching appendix on SEO, which is a dirty word in some places. I think that North approaches it with a nice balance between reaching for visibility while avoiding actions that are less than desirable.

The book ends with 3 example sites that the reader can be built as they work through the book. These cover a nice range of cases with one being for a school, another for a business and the third is a blog. This gives the reader nice opportunities to play with the software while having guidelines that keep moving things forward and give it all some useful context. A nice companion to this is an appendix with six case studies on existing sites that use Joomla. North interviewed someone from each site and gives an introduction to the site, a screen shot of their front page and then the questions and answers about the site. Together this forms very nice coverage on just what kind of possibilities exist from a real world perspective as opposed to keeping everything purely theoretical.

The book tends to lean towards explaining platform specific items, like installation, from the Windows perspective. I think the assumption is that Linux users will probably already know how to install what they need and are quite likely to already have all the supporting pieces in place. North explains the installation of WampServer for windows users, to get them started with a local install for working through the book. Everything is very hands on and while the screen shots are not in color they are clear and easy to understand. There are also highlighted notes that give the reader reinforcement on what is most necessary to take away from a section.

The support for the book outside of the copy itself is very good. The book comes with 45 days access through Safari. North’s site for the book has downloads for the associated files from the book as well as sql dumps from the MySQL databases that correspond to the example sites from the book. Everything necessary to build out the examples in the book, or compare one’s work to the authors should problems creep up.

I consider myself to be somewhat technically proficient and at times I did find myself skimming over material that I didn’t need. But I did want to use Joomla well and gain that skill quickly and this book was very helpful in that regard. I would think for anyone else who didn’t want to waste any time hunting around, this could be a useful guide. Another good use I could see for the book is that it would make an excellent gift to anyone who is not a ‘geek’ but is using a joomla based site. This could be a client that has a new site you just built for them, or a relative or friend who would like to have a site of their own but seem to call you for support a little too often. I know if I hand off a Joomla site to anyone in the future, unless they are already experience with it, they will be getting a copy of this book.

I’ve given the book a final rating of 8 on a scale of 10. I do so for two reasons. The first is that Joomla is constantly under development and it is more than likely that in a couple more years or less these instructions will need a major over haul. The second is that while the information on generating traffic was somewhat interesting, I’d have gladly traded it for more information on Joomla itself. Those are relatively minor complaints and from what I’ve seen, this may be the top Joomla book available right now.

Title: Joomla! A User’s Guide
Author: Barrie M. North
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Pages: 480
ISBN: 0136135609
Rating: 8/10
Tagline: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website