Drupal 7 Development by Example, Beginner's Guide by Kurt Madel

Having just finished a read through of Drupal 7 Development by Example Beginner's Guide (http://link.packtpub.com/K0y3L9), my first impressions are very good. The author takes quite a holistic approach to some of the more advanced techniques required during a site build and walks through them in a methodical and easy to follow manner.

The premise to the book is the creation of a recipe website using HTML5 and many of the examples whether they be code or UI techniques are based around changing the formatting or markup output by Drupal to produce the required HTML5.

The book starts off by installing some tools that any Drupal developer could be expected to be using, including mamp or xampp, drush, git and an IDE in this case Aptana studio and covers the install processes for both windows and Mac.

It then heads into the actual development and starts off quite basic by walking though setting up a content type and adding some fields, but then picks up speed quickly by diving into creating a couple of custom modules, one a field formatter to change the output of one of the fields, the other to add microdata support to a field.

It was around this point that I really started to get a good vibe from the book as the author ties the practical aspects of Drupal development with the notion of community involvement, which is of course what Drupal is famous for, it's community. There is a walk- through of creating an issue and a strong emphasis is placed on being a responsible community member by contributing any custom code that is developed.

Next up are a nice custom Compound field module to gather a collection of data and an Omega sub theme including a preprocess function to change the layout of some the fields and then in true Drupal style an alternative way to achieve a similar result this time through the UI.

The book takes a nice line from here between some advanced UI based techniques and some custom coded modules to achieve various, often requested, features in a Drupal site like a slideshow or tabbed content and in some cases both code and UI based versions are supplied.

Paralleled through these website development examples are snippets of Drupal.org project management, like creating a patch, promoting a sandbox project to a full project and a really nice inclusion, I thought, was the introduction of the coder module to ensure coding and security standards are being tested and also a chapter on creating Simpletests and the book closes off with a chapter on using the Features module and git to manage configuration between different environments of a Drupal site.

All in, I felt it was nicely paced book that takes off were a basic site builders book would probably have left off, to take prospective Drupal developer to that next level. The books ideal audience would probably be someone with some PHP and drupal knowledge looking for their first foray into Drupal 7 development or possibly a Drupal 6 developer, looking to upgrade their skills.

As a final note there are also some nice looking recipes included, about 6 in all, which does make me wonder whether I should be putting this next to Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver or beside my copy of the Definitive guide to Drupal 7. That being said I do think it would be a good addition to any bookshelf, which one I will leave you to decide.