Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6

David Mercer did a very good job at updating his previous book on Drupal, "Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals, and Community Websites", that was published on April 1006.

Although only two years have passed, the new features have quickly piled up.

This book can be read over one evening, but more time will be necessary if you are new to this Content Management System (or, as the Drupal community prefers it, Content Management Framework)

Don't forget to look up the section on the Content Construction Kit, a module which allows you to build custom content types that can present your information in a way "a little out of the ordinary."

If the title of this review has any particular meaning to you then buy a different Drupal book. If the title of this post looks like gibberish this is the book for you.

I was hoping for a high level pass over the Drupal architecture, and the basics of developing a Drupal site. This book is more of a point-and-click your way to the ultimate blog approach.

Despite being the wrong book for me it's not bad. It actually provides a nice walk through of the Drupal "GUI" and all the things you can do with it. If you've got a local install you could likely learn all of those things just as quickly by trial and error but a guided tour is always nice.

Long story short if you won't find any code in this book. Is that what you want?

This is a good book to read even if you read Drupal 5 by the same author/publisher. It is a beginning level book but covers the new features nicely. This book assumes you do not know HTML or PHP.
The illustrations of the dialog screens are very helpful. There is a very nice one of cpanel and phpMyAdmin although they are not part of Drupal, they can be used for back-ups of your Drupal website.
This is a nice book to put on your bookshelf and get down when a problem comes up that needs to be fixed right away.

I found this a reasonable overview of Drupal with a fair amount of information on the topics of online support/documentation, installation and system management. It wasn't as deep as I would have liked regarding actual website design within the Drupal framework. Although there's enough to get you started, it didn't cover what I need to know, such as using categories to build selections of content. I was also disappointed at its Windows-centric approach, skipping Unix and Mac environments. Overall, I would have been happier with this book at half the hefty price charged for it.

Inspect the book that you receive from Amazon carefully -- check total pages against the TOC. There are defective books circulating. They look identical to the "correct" books -- in thickness and even with respect to the Production Reference in the inside cover. However, the defective book has some 40 pages missing!

Amazon first sent me a book that was incomplete, and then followed with a replacement book that likewise was incomplete. (Took 1 month and three attempts before I ever saw a complete book.)