Drupal for Education and E-Learning

Another book in the drupal revolution! This book is unique in that it is really a "cookbook" for a teacher (of any kind) to setup a new drupal site to use to enhance their classes.

The target audience is new or intermediate drupal users. Certainly the main focus of the book is education. The examples go through creating a very usable class oriented website, but the skills illustrated in the book would really work for any website design.

I enjoyed reading one of the first tips in the introduction.. "take notes," it sounds like a teacher but it is a great way for a new system admin to document the choices they made setting up their system. It makes it much easier to go back to change something down the road.

There is just about no programming talk in Drupal for Education - so don't be scared - this book will show you how to set up a very useful drupal website as a "site admin." You will be using the administration interface (and copying files) the whole way. The last chapter goes into some of the more technical duties of running adrupal website like backups and "cron" jobs.

The examples in the book - which are all drupal version 6 - go through how to use CCK and Views the main "drupal extensions" that allow an admin to really customize their website. The authors then start adding cool stuff like audio, pictures and video functionality.

Forums, tagging, user accounts and permissions and managing multiple classes on the same website are also well covered. So the secret to this book is that it is a great "learn by example" book for really anyone that wants to setup a pretty complex website. If you go through the examples in this book you will have the skills to create many other "vertical market" type websites.

Read more about this book at http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-for-education-and-e-learning/book

Thanks for another great book in the Packt series of drupal books.