It's been quite a few months since the book came out and I could hardly sacrifice the time to read through, but finally I did it. While I was reading I came to realize that it's simply far more easier to understand that many of the dev books around. I bet many of you think that Drupal is a really powerful and flexible content management system, but also many of you think that it can really be a pain in the back, a time waster what makes you an endless reader of the support forums.

In fact, if you're not too familiar with the techniques, you can ridiculously soon become frustrated if you want something beyond installing and posting content to your fresh site.

This book, the Pro Drupal Development written by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate is really easy to understand. Both of the main authors are core contributors of Drupal so you really get the insights of this project.

I bought mine from the publisher as an e-book, but if you don't like reading hundreds of pages on screen, I recommend getting it from Amazon, you can get the paper version it for slightly more than I bought the pdf version.

So how one can overcome the frustrations caused by the complexity of the project? This book is really helps on that, it's amazing from many aspects. First of all, it uses a visual approach through the chapters which is quite uncommon and it makes a way better understanding of the big thing than complicated explanations. The book presents very useful flow charts and interaction schemes which makes the reader understand the core stuff easily.

The book is organized into 23 chapters and two appendices across 428 pages. It doesn't give you strict learning paths, it rather has the chapters fall into three categories: how Drupal works (Chapters 1, 19, and 23, and Appendix A), how to customize it (Chapters 2-18 and 22), and how to optimize your Drupal development efforts (Chapters 20-21, and Appendix B).

Customization parts deal with everything you might need to develop your site or site for your clients: modules, database structures, menus, nodes, themes, blocks, forms, filtering, files, taxonomy (categorization), jQuery, localization and more. It gives great tips on optimizing your code as well.

What this book is really good at is the details: it covers the entire stuff vertically in-depth and even a serious developer can find valuable information about the topics. It has a great volume of sample code and figures for illustrating the key concepts. No doubt, the authors are core developers and this reflects their work put in there very much.

As mentioned before being focused on details some of you might find the book dry and hard to consume. It's definitely not the style 'for Dummies' series but I suppose the target audience will much more appreciate the density of infos written down than touching it lightly. Smattering Drupal internals will not give you a success path, this is something I have learnt in my 2 year experience with Drupal. So if you are interested in mastering the inner workings of Drupal, and how to customize them, this is the book of choice.

Again, I do not recommend reading the book from cover to cover. Use it as a reference or read it chapter by chapter especially if you are stuck in some phase of the development of your module or theme.

The book has nice layout and typographically well-done, it really helps absorbing the material.

Final words: Pro Drupal Development is highly recommended for the PHP programmer and the site developers both. If you ever want a really in-depth look at how Drupal works and how to make the most of it.

Cons: it deals with 5.x which will be soon succecced by 6.x. Many core changes

• Read a sample chapter here.
• The book has an errata as well, found here.

You might want to check books related to Drupal out so far.