Apress is another publisher that has been putting out some excellent books focused on open source technologies in recent years. Last year's much needed entry to the world of Drupal development is no exception. Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate covers the popular open source content management framework with a depth that no previous book attempted, and is an essential guide for intermediate and advanced Drupal developers alike. At the time of this writing, I have yet to get through the entire book cover to cover. Simply put, I haven't had the opportunity to put to use some of the more advanced concepts in my own work yet. I have the feeling that this will be one of those books in my development library that gets dog eared from frequent referencing.

In some ways, I found the ordering of chapters to be unorthodox. I don't know that this takes anything away from the book overall, it was just presented in a way I didn't expect. The book begins with a short chapter about how Drupal works, then dives right into custom module development in chapter 2. I might have preferred to review information about the menu system, users, taxonomy, etc. before getting into module development, that way I would have been primed on these most critical Drupal concepts before taking the dive. However, another way to look at this is that the introduction on module development prepares the reader for the later chapters where these critical concepts are tied to module development. I see the logic.

Chapter by chapter, Pro Drupal Development provides a solid foundation in all things Drupal: the menu system, databases, users, nodes, the theme system (an excellent chapter), blocks, the form API, manipulating user input via the filter system, searching and indexing content, working with files, taxonomy, caching and sessions. There's also a useful chapter on using the newly integrated jQuery library, an excellent section on localization, and a chapter on sending and receiving XML-RPC calls. Finally, the book closes out with sections on security and best practices (these are a must for all Drupalers), optimizing Drupal for performance, and how to create your own installation profiles. The appendixes provide a handy database table reference and additional resources.

Before Pro Drupal Development hit the shelves, there were no advanced Drupal books available (though I did enjoy Drupal - Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites by David Mercer). For the developer who wanted to get under the hood and develop in depth, the most useful resources available were the Handbooks and support forums. Pro Drupal Development filled an enormous void and is an extremely useful guide book for Drupal 5. Drupal developers would be wise to access the authors' deep expertise to leverage this powerful content management framework.

UPDATE, 02/01/08: Michael J. Ross penned a fine review of this book that's worth checking out (via Slashdot.)