Drupal books

Manning Publishing (of the "in Action" series -- jQuery in Action, etc.) has a user group program where they send promotional copies of books and other materials to user groups in exchange for book reviews. Group organizers might be interested in signing up for this program at http://www.manning.com/ugprogram/ .

I have had a couple people request book recommendations for Drupal recently. This is for Drupal 6, but do you have any you prefer? I was surprised how many now exist.

The last one I purchased was early 2008, the Pro Drupal Development for 5.x from John K. VanDyk. That is the only one I've purchased, so I don't have anything to compare to, but I found it to be helpful. I don't have a lot of time to keep up with my drupal dev skills, so I get rusty and it serves as a more of a reference book for me than anything.

We can generate more interest for the monthly meetings with book exchanges. Members bring Drupal books to the monthly meetings and exchange with one of these methods: Book drawings: The donor holds up the book and explains its significance. Anyone who wants the book draws from a deck of cards. High card gets the book. Book swaps: Two members swap their books at the meeting Book lending: Members lend to other members. If members agreed to make the exchange at meetings that would be another reason to attend.

Thanks to our book sponsors, Apress, O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, and Packt, we have a MOUNTAIN of books to raffle away. We're going to be collecting business cards and €€€ on the first day, and will conduct the raffle on the second day. This is your chance to help us support the Drupal.org redesign sprints and get your hands on some juicy Drupal reading.

Here's the URL for the review.

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/1346258&from=rss

The meat of the review is at the end--the first part is a summary of the content.

I have the book, and at my stage of development, it is quite useful, though for an experienced developer it's likely one step above a Dick and Jane reader, I suspect. The reviewer takes the author to task for excessive wordiness, sloppy proofreading, and too much cutesy-ness in general, all of which are pretty much right on.

But I think this book is a Godsend for the beginner.

I thought I'd post a couple of quick links to some of the development resources mentioned by me and others last night at the PDXDUG meeting. (Andrew, maybe you can add a link to the module metrics you were talking about).

As we said last night, don't play on your production site; create a dev/sandbox copy where you can wipe everything out if it gets gnarly (and maybe this is obvious, but make sure you're using a different database that the main site too!).