Drupal 7 Development by Example Beginner’s Guide

I spent most of my holiday break picking through this book and going though the examples. At times, I felt like I was down in the weeds mindlessly entering code that I didn't really understand. While the overall recipe website example did a good job to illustrate some key features of Drupal, I felt like the book was missing an overview of how Drupal works.One frustrating thing that happened to me was code errors that were caused by the formatting of the code on my Kindle. I would enter in the code and then spend a long time trying to debug errors that were a product of Kindle formatting. Eventually, I decided to just start using the code from the files distributed by Packt Publishing and reviewing the code, rather than entering it in manually. I had to use the "dos2unix" utility to get the code distributed by the publisher to not have all of the funky Windows newline characters in it.On the up side, I sat down yesterday to write my own Drupal module for my own application and succeeded, mostly due to what I learned in the book.

D7 Dev by Example is in a category by itself. As a 1st year Drupaler, I gained a pretty good understanding of how to get the most out of developing for this framework. The examples are detailed and first rate. Kurt Mandel took me into areas I would not have explored without guidance. I think this book is a must read for solo developers. It is like adding an experienced team member to your crew. I bought the Kindle version and appreciated the active Internet links and the full color screen-shots which are crystal clear on the Kindle and PC. It got me to install GIT and Drush for the PC and to create a very handy USB localhost.Just cannot say enough good things about this text.

Finally, a book that details best practices in a step-by-step guide. It's great if you're already familiar with Drupal, but if you're a total beginner I'd look elsewhere (or at least skip the advanced parts your first time through or it'll freak you out).

If you don't have previous experience or exposure to developing Drupal Modules, do not buy this book. It is not definitely a beginner book..

Good book.

Thorough and easy to use Did the job and was easy to use and a very good buy. Would highly recommend

In the book "Drupal 7 Development by Example", author Kurt Madel guides the reader through the process of building a Drupal 7 website. Step by step we are building an HTML5 interactive recipe website. The book covers setting up content types, using Views to list recipes and create blocks, integrating the Media module, HTML5 theming and enhancing the website markup with Microdata. Furthermore widely used modules such as Webform, Fivestar, Views Slideshow and Features are covered.The book really takes a hands-on approach, and shows the reality of what is involved when doing day-to-day Drupal development and site building. When writing a book it is probably tempting to construct the examples in such a way that everything seems to work perfectly and without any headaches. I appreciate that the author of this book didn't take this road, but instead shows a glimpse of what real-life development is like: applying patches, browsing and interacting with the issue queues, writing missing functionality to existing modules, making decisions on whether to use -dev releases or not, and so on. Furthermore it is really nice to see that interacting with and contributing to the Drupal community is a recurring theme throughout the book, and not just a footnote.The examples used in the book are very useful, but some of them might be a bit too complex for absolute beginners. So when reading the book they might want to stop for a minute and find more background elsewhere (e.g. drupal.org) about what's going on exactly. Though people with some knowledge of Drupal concepts will find it refreshing to see examples that aren't totally dumbed down, but provide some challenge instead.A small downside to the book is that there are enough typos and small mistakes that should have been spotted in the reviewing process, for it to be a bit annoying (although granted, I tend to be overly sensitive to that). I also spotted a few practices in the book that I wouldn't recommend, such as granting Full HTML input format privileges too easily.Overall this book is a great resource for aspiring Drupal developers who (preferably) might have done some theoretical reading on Drupal and its APIs, but are lacking real-life experience with actually getting their hands dirty. It's a nice companion to guide you through the process of actually building a Drupal site and getting to know the Drupal-specific contribution processes.

Stunning book and must have.