Apress - Pro Drupal Development

Introduction

The journey of a software developer is an interesting one. It starts with taking things apart and inspecting the isolated components to try to understand the whole system. Next, you start poking at and hacking the system in an attempt to manipulate its behavior. This is how you learn—by hacking.

You follow that general pattern for some time until you reach a point of confidence where you can build your own systems from scratch. You might roll your own content management system, for example, deploy it on multiple sites, and think you’re changing the world.

But there comes a critical point, and it usually happens when you realize that the maintenance of your system starts to take up more time than building the features, when you wish that you knew back when you started writing the system what you know now. You begin to see other systems emerge that can do what your system can do and more. There’s a community filled with people who are working together to improve the software, and you realize that they are, for the most part, smarter than you. And even more, the software is free.

This is what happened to me, and maybe even you, upon discovering Drupal. It’s a common journey with a happy ending—hundreds of developers working together on one simultaneous project. You make friends; you make code; and you are still recognized for your contributions just as you were when you were flying solo.

This book was written for three levels of understanding. First and most importantly, there are pretty pictures in the form of diagrams and flowcharts; those looking for the big picture of how Drupal works will find them quite useful. At the middle level are code snippets and example modules. This is the hands-on layer, where you get your hands dirty and dig in. I encourage you to install Drupal, work along with the examples (preferably with a good debugger) as you go through the book, and get comfortable with Drupal.

The last layer is the book as a whole: the observations, tips, and explanations between the code and pictures. This provides the glue between the other layers. If you’re new to Drupal, I suggest reading this book in order, as chapters are prerequisites for those that follow.

Lastly, you can download this book’s code examples as well as the flowcharts and diagrams from http://drupalbook.com or http://www.apress.com.

Good luck and welcome to the Drupal community!