reviews

With the first official release of Drupal 7 imminent, the first books on Drupal 7 start appearing everywhere. Some of them are first editions, others are updates of their Drupal 6 counterpart. One of those updates are "Drupal 7 module development", published on Packt and written by some of the most brilliant contributors to the Drupal project: Matt Butcher, Larry Garfield, John Wilkins, Matt Farina, Ken Rickard and Greg Dunlap. Oh my. I'm also very proud to be one of the technical reviewers of the book.

In the past the bible for Drupal module development has been "Pro Drupal Development". Let's see if this new book is as good, or can be a nice extension to this epic title.

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.

Search is ubiquitious. It's available on all sites, desktop applications, ... A good search engine is something essential for letting your users get what they want. There's a lot of factors that define what a makes a good search engine: speed, accuracy of the results, ...

Drupal has already a plethora of solutions these problems. There is a search module in core. We also have integration with Google Search Appliance, Custom search, Lucene, ... But most recently Apache Solr is hotter than hot and seems to become the standard replacement for Drupal's core search solution. Even more now since Acquia uses it as the core of one of its flag products, Acquia Search.

Drupal is getting a hotter and hotter topic by the day. This is proven by the amount and the diversity of books being published about it. There are beginner books, advanced books, the ones with a more hands-on approach. There are books about module development, theming, ... But the most significant proof that Drupal is hot is that some books are available already that cover only a small topic of Drupal like security, views and now also JavaScript and jQuery. And it are those latest few that are the most appealing from my point of view.

In particular I've been really looking forward to Matt Butcher's Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery. This book covers JavaScript and jQuery from a Drupal point of view. Drupal already opted very early for jQuery as its preferred JavaScript framework. In time, Drupal added another library on top of jQuery (Drupal.js) that gives Drupal themers and module developers a range of tools on the JavaScript layer to translate strings, use some kind of theming (like the "PHP one"), easier work with AJAX, ... These things aren't covered very well (yet) in the Drupal handbook and API. This book fills this gap.

A lot of Drupal books have come out lately. A ... lot. One that I've seen lately is called Drupal 6 - Social Networking and is actually pretty good. It is published by Packt Publishing and written by Michael Peacock. The goal of the book is to provide users who want to build their own social network (think Twitter, Facebook, ...) a step by step guide.

The book starts by explaining what a Social Network is and what it can do for you and your company. It goes then further by installing and configuring Drupal. It provides a nice walk through the most used configuration screen. After following that by introducing you to nodes, blocks, menus, themes and modules you get a nice overview of how Drupal is built up.