Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide Book – Initial Impressions

I recently got a copy of the new Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide ebook by Dorien Herremans to review. I am currently working through it and will be putting up a comprehensive review soon, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with you, having read through the first few chapters and skimmed the rest of the book.  Let me preface this all by saying that I am really really looking forward to working though this book.

Unlike the other Drupal books that I have reviewed on this blog, Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide doesn’t necessarily strike me as a book for complete newbies.  While the web savvy and CMS knowledgeable newbie will be able to pick up and follow along with the examples, it may prove to be a little perplexing for the complete utter newbie.

The author doesn’t go into a lot of detail on the basics of installing Drupal, installing and enabling modules, and themes, and all that. That shouldn’t discourage you however, because it’s easy to pick up the basics from this blog and other websites and then take what’s in the book and run with it. And from what I can tell, the benefits that you will glean from this book are worth the extra effort. The book is very fast paced with minimal fluff, and sets about the task of teaching you how to build a community website with vigor and enthusiasm.  The author employs many modules and teaches you how to implement almost all the features you could think of, sometimes in pretty interesting and unexpected ways, such as creating user profiles using CCK instead of the inbuilt profile module.  Pretty sweet.

Dorien offers great support for her book at the website “Drupalfun” which is actually the product of the book, so you can join the community and ask questions as you go. This, I think, is one of the strengths of this book, and a great part of its appeal to me. I will post a more comprehensive review when I finish working through Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide, but I can confidently say even this early that this is definitely a book worth having!