Customer Rating:  
Summary: First glance on Drupal for the mentally stable
Comment: Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6
It looks like the folks at Packt Publishing have done their best to have this tutorial hit the market immediately after the release of Drupal 6. In other words, it bears all the marks of a hasty job.
Numerous typos in the book support this view. Worse is the fact that the beta or early versions of Drupal 6 have undergone revisions that are absent from the book. The current Drupal version, 6.8, got rid of menu items or fields that David Mercer's Packt book still uses. As a result a novice as myself not only has to master a new cms but also puzzle on unmatching examples, e.g. the now obsolete Add field and Add group tabs on page 206.
This is not the only problem of this book. Whoever wants to use Drupal needs to be able to use PHP and MySQL, either on your provider's server or on your own PC. Mercer suggests the use of Apache2Triad or XAMPP, ignoring Mac and Linux users who'll want to use MAMP or LAMP. Worse, Mercer doesn't tell us that in order to simulate visitors of our Drupal site on our own machine your Drupal site has got to be online in order to get passwords sent to these visitors through the Sendmal or Postfix provision of your system.
Scattered over the book are poor quality screenshots, sometimes referring to colors you can't see in the book because it's black and white, and often with discrepancies between picture and text. Again, the novice will have to figure out what on earth the specs are of a field called Species (page 204) or Similar Animals (page 206).
If you don't know what cron or a cronjob is this book is going to inform you about their existence. For me, to configure the automated update process which cron is, I had to go out on the internet. Fortunately, I came across a very good video tutorial explaining me all about curl or lynx or gwet and how to get cron running for a Drupal installation on MAMP. This book just told me cron exists, but I needed the internet for the howto.
It is understandable that a book cannot keep up with ongoing changes, but I can't think of a good excuse for Packt not to include changes in the errata or in a PDF-update that may be downloaded from their website by Packt-customers.
So this is mainly what this Packt book does for you: it informs you somewhat about Drupal and gives you a random bunch of sloppy examples.
Should you buy this book? If you need a first glance on Drupal, if you're not afraid of puzzling and you're ready to overpay for what you get, yes, this book may help you. But if you get upset easily when things aren't clear on a first reading, then stay away.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great overview of Drupal
Comment: I'm a Drupal newbie, and I appreciated the way that this book covered all the different aspects of Drupal. Granted, it didn't go into very much depth, but it did well in giving a general overview of the program, and how to use it. It also gives a brief idea of the possibilities available to the web programmer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just OK.
Comment: I'm new to Drupal and this book served as a cursory review of the functionality found in Drupal.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good update on Drupal 6
Comment: 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."
Customer Rating:
Summary: SELECT $this -> book && return oops
Comment: 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?
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