Hi All,
On September 26th, I am planning to offer a training session in Portland focused on the basics of PHP, MySQL, and beginning Drupal theming and programming. The main object of the course will be to enable participants to benefit from the wealth of documentation on Drupal, which almost always assumes a level of knowledge that people new to Drupal often lack. When I was first learning Drupal a few years ago, I found it frustrating that terms like "keyed array", "inner join", "hook", and "preprocess" were thrown around as though simply signing up for an account on drupal.org should in some way bestow this arcane knowledge on the new registrant. For the most part, the same is true today, which makes learning Drupal on one's own a daunting prospect. It is my hope that this course will cover everything one would need to know in order to begin making progress along those lines.
If there is enough interest in this kind of thing, I may try to develop a small side business around courses of this type. Since this is a trial run, I'm setting the price at $75 for a 5-hour course, 1pm-6pm on Saturday, September 26th.
Signup is on http://abracadrupal.com, and the size of this first group will be very limited. Please feel free to contact me or comment here if you have any questions about the course, or if there are any points you think I should cover.
Cheers!
David