negu said
This book starts with telling you that you need version control, install scripts, backups, etc. If you don't heed this good advice then things will get annoying and bad/evil quickly because you may be in a position to maintain and update said sites. In this case, you will need a solution that scales, so if you have 20+ or 100+ drupal sites, you will look like the guy on the cover very quickly- worn the hell out!
This book is very information-rich. It takes a project-management and business requirements-analysis perspective on drupal sites, which is really helpful. Some of the user stories, uml and flow charts might be unfamiliar or abstruse to some but for others, really compelling and helpful. It's definitely a well-thought out book that takes a different perspective from the 'dive in and build a newspaper site with these modules' approach. It expects you to be a little more mature than that as drupal developer.
Jason Kirst said
As a website developer specializing in Drupal-based sites for the last few years, I found this book to be exactly what I needed. I have several other books about drupal, including Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional) and Learning Drupal 6 Module Development: A practical tutorial for creating your first Drupal 6 modules with PHP, yet I have found Leveraging Drupal to be the most helpful yet.
Leveraging Drupal goes into precisely the topics related to Drupal development which your average "working stiff" building Drupal sites runs into on every job: version control, the development and deployment process, upgrades, internationalization options, theming, etc. Included are helpful life-saving tidbits such as dealing with the infamous WSOD (php's white screen of death), checking out drupal via CVS, and setting up cron. It more than pays for itself in just the first three chapters.
One of the things I like most about the book is that the author treats website development with the same respect as any software project. From the book: "First of all, in a software project (and because of it's complexity, that is what a website application is), you are either controlled by circumstances or you succeed - but only if you can maintain your grip on things."
I would compare it to my other favorite programming book: Agile Java(TM): Crafting Code with Test-Driven Development (Robert C. Martin Series) by Jeff Langr. Leveraging Drupal is similar in that after reading and digesting it, you are a more mature developer than you were before.
Michael McKee said
This is not your typical how to book that starts from simple concepts and gradually builds into more complex areas. It starts by going into team roles and responsibilities, a subject that is seldom mentioned in any software book, and jumps right into the deep end of the pool with version control. There are screen dumps of terminal processes and code sprinkled throughout.
That is not to say that concepts are not adequately explained. They are, or that the small shop wouldn't benefit from this book. It can. It's just that the reader will find subject progression to be a bit different than typical. It works, especially within the context of the project the book covers, a writing workshop site.
As far as post-production responsibilities goes, that is one that is generally not addressed before website development and that lack shows in poorly maintained sites and inter-organizational bickering if not addressed early on in the process. I'm glad to see it mentioned here. That point highlights the audience for this book. It doesn't seem written for the lone developer or small team that builds third party sites but for an IT department that will deploy the project and maintain the site.
The project the book details, a membership based writing workshop, is well conceived as an example of the Drupal's extreme flexibility. The third party modules used, like CCK and Views are the foundation add-ons for custom Drupal sites. Other helpful modules, that I haven't used before are also covered and well. The book simultaneously covers version 5, 6 and 7 of Drupal, which could be useful within a company that has to maintain its own sites.
How to create custom administrative views for different site users is well covered. The resulting website is truly custom but in usable real-world ways. And I appreciate the short chapter on jQuery and the little preview of Drupal 7.
For someone who has at least some basic Drupal chops and wants to see how a real expert goes about developing a site, this is could be a good addition to the bookshelf.
Anthony Wasserman said
We're starting to see some good books on Drupal, such as Using Drupal or even Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional), but this book isn't one of them.
If you are looking for a process for building a content-based web application, then there is quite a bit of valuable material here, but it is largely independent of the Drupal technology. The book focuses on an agile development process for web applications, with occasional discussions about how to install or upgrade versions of Drupal 6, and what's coming in Drupal 7. That material can easily be found (at no cost) on the drupal.org site. Once you remove those chapters, you can easily create plug-compatible books entitled Leveraging Joomla, Leveraging ExpressionEngine, Leveraging eZ Publish, and so on for other open source CMS's.
This book continues the longtime Wrox Press pattern of being early to market on new topics, often at the expense of quality. Tim O'Reilly's name is misspelled on page 7, and the book contains references to Wikipedia entries, a sign that the author couldn't or didn't find the original source material.
Dean Meyers said
In creating web sites, there will be those who will find their strength in the Theming/User Interface side, and those who are wizards at functionality, creating modules that add yet more capabilities. I would consider this book best for the project manager or small shop developer who has to oversee the entire process while interacting with clients, developers and designers, and wants a thorough approach to successful use of Drupal for any size application.
While relatively new to Drupal, I have designed and developed web sites since 1995. I believe the most common problems or bottlenecks come not nearly as much from the question of the software chosen or even the design, but resolving what the site is supposed to do, who is going to use it, and how it will be managed and maintained. This became a greater issue when non-technical administrators took over the mundane tasks of refreshing content, approving users, etc., through the use of user-friendly content management systems. Development expanded and widened in scope, and content management systems are now complex applications.
As Drupal has risen in popularity through its flexibility, scalability and stability as a CMS platform, a good number of books have come out to help developers jump on board, some with a focused approach on building functionality or designing themes, while others offer more general instruction on setting up and getting a site online. Victor Kane's book falls somewhere between both, but adds two components that often are not accounted for in this kind of "how to" book.
First, he explains how to create a framework for approaching software/web site development that begins with client-oriented goals. He specifically advocates the use of an Agile approach, dedicating the first chapter not to Drupal per se, but to putting a plan in order before unpacking the software or installing a single module. He consistently refers back to this approach as he guides the user through the development of a model site (an On-line Writing Workshop), returning to Agile development more deeply in Chapter 11.
Second, while many development teams attached to IT departments in larger companies or agencies are used to keeping track of revisions when a job is split up between many programmers, the "one-man team" can learn best practices through the software examples given in the book that explain the hows and whys of keeping a web-based tracking system for Drupal site development. More than just mentioning this as good advice, he puts it to practice throughout the book. I haven't seen this discussed in most books about open source CMS development, and I think it's worth noting. You will learn about Version Control nearly as much as you will learn about Drupal from this book!
Where there might be more than one way of doing something, such as installing Drupal onto a home system for testing or loading it onto a shared host, he will give as many as two or three different ways to do so. There is little he doesn't discuss thoroughly, and he invites the reader to join him in expanding and improving the lessons in the book through a web site he has set up to continue the learning/mentoring/sharing process that is a hallmark of the Drupal community's approach to "world domination".
As with other books on Drupal, you might want to have some books on PHP around, along with a little background in Unix/Linux shell commands, CSS and HTML for reference. He adds a chapter on jQuery and is probably the first in print with some content on Drupal 7, which is projected to arrive in late 2009.
It's a great addition to the growing number of books on Drupal, and stands out for his unique discussion of planning and versioning, which is applicable to any web project.
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