Packt Publishing is on a roll. They have been releasing a few Drupal books recently on a broad variety of topics. We have seen books on Social Networking with Drupal, JavaScript and jQuery, multimedia, ...
Last week they have released a new book focusing on performance and maintenance, called Drupal 6 Performance Tips. Although the title focusses on the performance topic, a lot of tips are also provided for maintaining or developing your site.
To get you up to speed, the book explains how to upgrade your website to the latest Drupal version in case you're still running on Drupal 5. If you're running on Drupal 6 already, you may skip this chapter, or still read on to get a taste of what upgrading Drupal is like. I can recommend this with Drupal 7 around the corner.
With your Drupal 6 site up and running you are then provided with a few tips, to keep it running smoothly: tweaking some server settings, installing and configuring Update Status, setting up Drupal's core caching, running cron and keeping your database snappy with DB Maintenance. You'll also learn how to backup your site in case something might go wrong. You even get a full introduction to the Devel module to ease the development of new features or generate some load/content on your site.
The second half of the book is fully dedicated to more advanced caching methods like Boost, Memcache and Cache Router, Advanced Cache and Authenticated User Page Caching. Developers, webmaster and owners of popular site generating quite some traffic who have never heard of these techniques and modules should definitely get a look into this.
The book concludes with a final chapter explaining how to use Drupal's multisite feature to use the same codebase (and even database tables) for more then 1 site.
Don't expect measurements and graphics of how much faster some solution is and why it is faster. Consider this book a nice catalog of what tricks are available for Drupal maintenance and tweaking. Drupal developers and users having played with tools like Boost, Memcache etc. might find little joy in this book. But for other users who own or created a few Drupal sites and looking for the next step, this is a great book.
If you're running one or more Drupal sites and like to know a few tips how to maintain them and tweak their performance, this might be a great book for you. For developers, webmaster and owners of popular Drupal sites this is a must read.
In order to help promote the book, Packt Publishing has provided a free download of Drupal 6 Performance Tips' fifth chapter: Using DB Maintenance and Boost.
There's a 15% discount for you when you buy through PacktPub.com. Enter the following discount code at checkout in the shopping cart: Drupal6PT15 (case sensitive). As with all of Packt’s Drupal books, Packt will be donating a percentage of its sales to the Drupal Association.
Comments
Advanced users should read books about each topic itself imho. If you want to know more about memcache, read a book about memcache. You'll figure out how to use it with Drupal then.
I can echo this statement. This feeling is also shared by a bunch of people on the d.o announcement. This book covers a couple of performance boosting modules but all in all it doesn't go beyond the basics. It might be OK for mid-range projects but you won't find what you need when you're working on high-profile sites that need a whole lot more tweaking.
Not completely agreeing here. You probably have quite some Drupal experience and really get the hang out of working with Drupal handbook, searching blogs etc. There's a lot of people out there who don't work this way. And it's not always the unexperienced. I meet a lot of people everyday who have are working with Drupal a lot but not full time. They want a book where they get an overview of what's available. This book is for them. And for them it's a great book. Not for us. Since Drupal is really attracting a lot of users every day now, it's nice to give these people books like this.
More review of this book is here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/51133#comment-146943
As an alternate point of view, I'd like to offer my own post on this book: http://www.nowarninglabel.com/home/drupal-6-performance-tips-thumbs-down
The point is the same as yours, you already have some experience in Drupal, then this book is probably not for you.
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