Drupal books
Pro Drupal Development book for Drupal 6
Less than two years ago, I wrote the foreword for the first edition of Pro Drupal Development book. What was missing at that time was a developer book for Drupal. By writing the first version of this book, John and Matt made an incredible contribution to Drupal's steady growth. The book cracked the Amazon Top 100 and was one of my personal highlights of 2007. More than 10,000 copies were sold! It still blows my mind to think that one book has given the world more than 10,000 new or greatly improved Drupal developers.
Since the first version of this book was published, we released Drupal 6, a big step forward, with new and improved APIs. In fact, Drupal 6 had over 700 individual contributors who have patches included in the core code. Together, we've made important theme system improvements, better support for multi-lingual websites, an improved menu system, form API improvements, Javascript goodies, and much more. The net result is that Drupal 6 is an even better web application development platform than Drupal 5.
Probably to John and Matt's despair (sorry!), all of the chapters of the original Pro Drupal Development book went partially out of date. Fortunately, the second edition of this book fixes all that and it started shipping a couple of weeks ago! Check it out at http://drupalbook.com.
The second edition of Pro Drupal Development covers all of the capabilities and developer facilities in Drupal 6, and provides deep insight into the inner workings and design choices behind Drupal 6. If anything was missing for Drupal 6, it was this book, and I'm already indebted to John for revising and expanding it.
Hagen's Drupal 6 book in the mail
Hagen Graf has written his second German Drupal book: Drupal 6: Websites entwickeln und verwalten mit dem Open Source-CMS published by Addison-Wesley. The book also comes with a German Drupal 6 training video. And for every copy sold, 1 EUR is donated to the Drupal Association Thanks Hagen!
@Hagen, next time take a picture of your book on my website? ;-)
The book talks about Mollom!
Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 book
Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is an update to David Mercer's two year old book Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites.
Just like David's previous book, this book is geared towards people who are new to Drupal and that have little or no experience in website design, PHP, MySQL or HTML. If you want practical advice on how to get a Drupal site up and running, this book is for you. Unlike David's first Drupal book, this book also caters to the intermediate Drupal user as it talks about Drupal's content construction kit, actions, triggers and even jQuery. Reading this book won't make you a Drupal expert, but it will give you a solid base from which to build.
Learning Drupal 6 module development book
Matt Butcher's Learning Drupal 6 module development book an great introduction to begin developing on Drupal. It is not for the die-hard developer, but it looks like a must have for new Drupal developers. Thanks for for putting this book together, Matt!
Drupal 5 themes book in the mail
Remember how I predicted that 10 Drupal books would get published in 2008? Well, the first book showed up in the mail this morning.
Ric Shreves has written a Drupal 5 themes book. The book is published by Packt, who mailed me a handful of copies to give away at future Drupal events.
I don't have a design background but it looks like a good book that explains the workings of the Drupal theme system and Drupal's PHPTemplate enginge, that explains you how to build a theme, and that provides practical solutions to common problems during that process. If you are a hardcore developer, this book might not be for you.
More information, including a free chapter on how to work with theme engines, can be found at the publisher's website
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Drupal Pro Development numbers
You might remember that a week after the Pro Drupal Development book shipped, it cracked the Amazon top-100. The book remains in the 4,000-5,000 rank at Amazon, where it has 28 reviews and an average of 5/5 stars.
Well, John VanDyk, co-author of the Pro Drupal Development book, wrote in to say that during the first 2.5 months (April, May, June) more than 6,000 copies were sold. And this number doesn't include sales data for July, August, September or October.
Without a doubt, these numbers are truly amazing. It is simply astounding to think that in a few short months one book has given the world 10,000 new or greatly improved Drupal developers. It blows my mind.
I guess this explains why publishers are looking for Drupal book authors. And in case you are wondering, there is still room for more Drupal books.
Pro Drupal Development book for Drupal 5
John VanDyk and Matt Westgate have written a Drupal book for developers: Pro Drupal Development, published by Apress.
Last week, I finally got a copy of the book in the mail and now I've read it, I can say that it is exactly what we expected it to be: awesome.
So, John and Matt -- for the love of God -- make sure there will be a Drupal 6 version of that book.
More information, including a free chapter on how to theme Drupal, can be found at http://drupalbook.com.
