Interviewed

Hey, I got interviewed by OStatic about Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition. I mention giant bunnies in the interview.

What Pro Drupal Development is, and What it Is Not

As copies of Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition hit the streets, I'd like to take a moment to clarify what the book is and what it is not.

What it is not

• A complete and comprehensive guide to using MySQL with Drupal
• A detailed howto on integrating Drupal with Sphinx
• The ultimate reference on using jQuery/AJAX/JavaScript with Drupal
• A step-by-step tutorial on building an ecommerce site with Drupal
• ...

What it is

The target audience of Pro Drupal Development is smart people who know PHP (or other languages; PHP can be picked up pretty easily) and are looking for an overview of how Drupal core works. It achieves this by walking through Drupal's major systems: users, nodes, filters, triggers, themes, etc. One of the challenges in writing the book was knowing when to stop. Take theming, for example. To do justice to Drupal's theming system would take a 400-page book in itself. The same goes for working with multimedia files, or optimization, or jQuery. The idea of Pro Drupal Development is to lay down the basics in each of these areas so that the reader is oriented and can then go on to use other resources, or to just better understand the code itself. Other books are being written that will provide great detail in specific areas, and I'm glad to see that -- it's a sign that Drupal is maturing and becoming well-known enough that there is a demand.

Pro Drupal Development was written to provide an on-ramp for intelligent people starting with Drupal so they can avoid months of feeling dumb in irc or having to piece together the big picture from a blog post here, a doc page there, a README here (that's the way I learned Drupal, and it's a frustrating way to learn). If the book fulfills this goal (and from my conversations with new developers it has) then I am satisfied.

When you find errors in the book, please post them as errata so that others can benefit. I'd recommend that when you get the book, go through the errata and make notes in the margins so that when you use the book for reference, you'll see the corrections. With the first edition, we were able to correct a lot of the errors in the second and third printings.

Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition arrives

The author's copies of Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition arrived today. At 667 pages, the book is significantly thicker than the first edition!

I worked on this edition from November of 2007 to July 2008 pretty much without stopping. One morning my daughter found me in the living room writing a chapter at 3 am. It is difficult to express how much work this book has been, and how happy I am to hold the printed copy in my hands. Those who have written books will understand. :) I am glad to finally have it get into the hands of Drupal developers everywhere, and I hope that this contribution helps to complete the transition from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. Thanks so much to all who have helped with this project!

Profits from the book go to this little guy's college fund. (And if you buy it through drupalbook.com, the Drupal Association gets a percentage of each sale.)

Second edition progress

I thought I'd update everyone on the progress of the second edition of Pro Drupal Development.

The second edition will cover Drupal 6, and is expanded to cover new core topics like actions, triggers, AHAH, etc.

Pro Drupal Development on Slashdot

The book Pro Drupal Development is reviewed today on Slashdot.

It's shipping!

The book is finally making its way into hands of eager developers. Time for a bit of reflection. Writing this book was like one long code sprint. Because many topics couldn't be written about until the Drupal 5 codebase was frozen, we stacked a lot of the writing towards the end of the cycle. That meant that often we were each writing a new chapter, soliciting informal reviews from experts in a topic area from within the Drupal community, reviewing a chapter in the technical edit phase, and reviewing a chapter in the copy edit phase simultaneously. Towards the end, we added production-ready proof reviews to the menu.

Like a software project, the scope of the book had to be firmly enforced or it would not be in your hands today. But I'm glad it is. I'm also really happy that Matt agreed to be coauthor. Often his work would spur mine on (and, I think, vice versa). chx was amazing too, often turning around code reviews in a matter of hours. The Drupal community is, in short, amazing.

I'll just summarize by saying: whew.

And in case you've read the author info, here are some photos of a Bell & Howell Apple ][.

Drupal book printed

A box arrived today. Inside...copies of Pro Drupal Development hot off the press!

In the picture I'm holding my youngest son. He's in the picture to show what an optimist I am. I assured my wife that writing a book would be no problem. Why, it would be done long before the baby was born. Er. We'll celebrate his first birthday in a few weeks.

Off to the Printer

As we were writing the Drupal book, Matt and I frequently wondered how many pages it would come out to. We estimated about 300 pages.

When the book went to the printer, the total page count was just above 450.

Oh so close!

We are less than a week away from going to print with Pro Drupal Development!

We didn't quite get the book into print before the 2007 OSCMS Summit. If you're attending, I'll be the tall guy in the trench coat going "Pssst! Wanna buy a Drupal book?"

I plan to lug a copy of the proofs along for anyone who wants to flip through the book. Hmm, maybe I'd better weigh them before I make that commitment.

Proofreading

In the mad scramble to get this book to press, it seems to be a whirlwind of proofing, fonts, subtle errors in figures, and a ton of other last-minute minutiae.