Best approach to breaking book into chapters?

The Book module gives you automatic links to daughter pages. Other than that a book page is a regular Drupal node. You'll still need other means to efficiently navigate the recipes, such as taxonomy tags, menus, blocks in sidebars calling out special recipes (or parts thereof), subdivided content fields, perhaps node references, etc.

Your approach for a book is basically correct, but before you start, build at least a taxonomy reflecting your main chapters and make it mandatory for the recipe book content type. Perhaps build taxonomies for food groups, cuisine type, etc. This project cries out for classifications! Look at dead-tree recipe books and get some ideas from there. Read up on Drupal taxonomy to get into the groove. You'll be glad you did.
Hint: The taxonomy-vtn module builds an awesome index for your "book".

After taxonomies are squared away, you'll want to look into CCK. Recipes are highly structured, and so should your content type be. Use the database as what it is, to help you store pieces of recipe pages as fields, so you can later address them individually with Views. So study CCK and Views if you haven't already.

If your client will be adding recipes herself, you probably want to architect the site such that content organizes itself. I.e. your client shouldn't have to think how to integrate this cake recipe into the dessert menu. Many ways to do this, one being taxonomy coupled to a view.

My 2 cts.

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Christoph Weber | http://dialogconsulting.biz

Kevcol: Like Christopher wrote, "Book module gives you automatic links to daughter pages" and that's pretty much it. A good place to see this is the Drupal handbook on drupal.org. (Or is it called "Documentation" now?)

Say you have 5 pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. When in a book, you will have 3 links in the bottom, allowing user to either go the previous page or the next page or go "up" to the "main page" (I don't remember the exact Drupal terminology). So let's say you start out with page 1 and you "outline" pages 2-5 "under" page 1. On page 3 you will have the following links:

<<Previous--Title of Page 2      UP: (to Page 1)     Title of page 4--Next>>

You can add more pages or reduce the number of pages and of course Drupal updates all the links automatically. You outline other pages "under" any of the existing pages too and later move them around.

Personally, I find the "previous" and "next" links absolutely critical to the vast majority of sites. The user gets to the bottom of the page and suddenly there's no next destination suggestion. The user has to scroll back up to use the menu system. The book gives this "continuing story" feel to the site that I think makes the site more sticky.

My experience with book has been the building of a blog I write from overseas. However, later I realized having index pages with teasers are also very important. But by that time, I had built many pages with giant panorama's on the top of the page, which end up appearing in the teasers too and result in virtually unnavigable index pages.

So I am in process of moving the content of each page to a new CCK content type (with imagecache resizing of image for teaser) that is NOT using the book funcationality.

I am hesitant to put my content in a book again because the book forces me to place each node in a specific place in the outline. I would like each node to appear in many categories and not to have to decide it's place in a given outline. For me, this is the book's major limitation. It is too static.

Does anyone feel that way too?

But at the same time, I love book's Next-UP-Previous links functionality. So is there a module out there that can somehow duplicate the book's Next-UP-Previous links functionality? Ideally, it would line up NEXT nodes dynamically based on the taxonomy the user happens to have clicked on last.