What seems like a very long time since I first heard about and ordered the new Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development, it finally arrived at my doorstep. So far, I have only read Chapter 1, "How Drupal Works", and glanced at the remaining pages of the book but I'm very impressed. The book is written in a very easy, well organized, and informative writing style.
This book is perfect for people like me and most of you, the Drupal Developer Wannabe. I'm no dummy and have written Web pages since the mid 1990s during the days of pre-HTML 2.0, Perl, and CGI. But for some but for some reason (perhaps lack of time) I've had a hard time transitioning from a user of Drupal to a developer/contributor for Drupal. While the information in the Drupal Handbooks is very good, I find at times that the information there is either too little or too much to help me over the Drupal learning curve. I think this book will be very helpful in dealing with my wannabe problems.
A sample chapter of Pro Drupal Development is available by the publisher, Apress. However, I have found sample chapters are really difficult to judge how well the remaining pages in the book are written. Besides some very well written chapters on Drupal development, the book also contains what I call bonus chapters and a must read for anyone developing a web site. The bonus chapters deal with topics above and beyond Drupal including writing secure code, performance optimization, development best practices, and installation profiles. In other words this book isn't just for the Drupal Developer Wannabe, but also the system/site administrator. For whatever it's worth, I'm telling you this book is well worth the money you'll be spending on it. Congratulations to the authors, John K. Vandyk and Matt Westgate, for writing this must have book on Drupal!