Drupal Hound said
I bought this book the day it came out, since I work on Drupal performance problems for a living. Unfortunately, the book is often off topic (upgrades, etc), doesn't really address any of the serious issues well, and doesn't seem to be focused on any particular audience.
Unfortunately, I'd call it a flop. It's definitely a "dissapointing" rating: not worth the money, and not worth buying.
I hope the next effort is better.
Kevin said
This book is supposed to provide: "crucial performance-related information for users of all experience levels."
That is false. The book is a ripoff of content from the main Drupal site drupal dot org. Nearly the entire book consists of, here is module X, go download it from drupal dot org and enable it, oh and let's pad the pages by giving you the enabling steps for each module we suggest.
The book devotes 50, count 'em 50 pages to how to update Drupal. This is ridiculous. All of that information is available in the Drupal handbook pages online or in the API docs or in more concise format in books such as 'Using Drupal' which will give you a lot more value.
You would be better off to join the high-performance group on drupal dot org (Google for high performance group drupal, it is the first result, since Amazon removes links) and read the drupal dot org handbook pages.
You can find the rest of my review at nowarninglabel dot com, which is my blog.
Michael Anello said
From the opening chapter detailing how to upgrade your site to the most recent version Drupal to the final chapter covering multisite performance, this Drupal book fills an obvious void in anyone's Drupal library.
For anyone who is in charge of maintaining a Drupal site, this book is starts off as a good reference for understanding and modifying not only Drupal configuration settings but also PHP (via both php.ini and .htaccess) and MySql settings.
The book does a nice job of explaining all of the various caching and performance options that are available in Drupal core as well as how to leverage the Devel module to dive deep (really deep!) into your site's inner workings in order to troubleshoot problems.
Articles about Views and Panels caching is a subject that one rarely sees online, let alone on a printed page. An excellent step-by-step approach in the book explains to the reader not only how to use Views and Panels caching, but perhaps even more importantly, how to measure its effects using the Devel module. Great stuff.
For those site admins who really want to crank up the performance on their Drupal site, the book devotes almost two entire chapters to using the Boost module. This module creates a static file cache of your site's content often resulting in amazing performance gains. The authors clearly know much about this subject and go into great detail explaining how it works and how to best configure it for your site.
The latter chapters of the book cover advanced topics such as Memcache, Cache Router, as well as patches to Drupal core to add even more performance (not unlike what is done with the Pressflow Drupal distribution).
It's pretty rare for a single Drupal book to be pertinent to both new users as well as advanced Drupal developers and site admins. Drupal 6 Performance Tips pulls this off nicely. If you're new to Drupal, then the first three chapters are almost a must-read. Site administrators for medium-sized sites will get a lot out of the middle three chapters while advanced Drupalers will be amazed as the depth and knowledge contained in the final chapters.
Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk have done a great job distilling a complicated and often hard-to-understand subject into something any Drupal developer or site administrator will learn from.
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