I just finished reading Front End Drupal (buy on Amazon, companion site) and wanted to share some of my favorite points, some parts that could be enhanced, and some ideas I have for ways to expand it in a future edition. I've known Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer for some time now through the Drupal community and respected their work. So, I was quite interested to see how they would do in book medium: it's some impressive work. In my experience training and writing books, one of the hardest things is picking the right audience for the book and then making sure that your book has support for people above and below the level of your ideal audience. You need sidebars to help explain details on advanced topics and good section titles so that advanced people know when to stop skimming over the things they know and start reading again.
This photo shows a nice screenshot, some helper explanation text, and my next read in the background.
Favorite Parts of Front End Drupal
There are several general things and several specific things that I liked about this book:
- They cover not only "Front End Drupal" but also some best practices for Web design and information architecture in general.
- Mixed among the details of template files and overrides is solid advice about how to configure Drupal's core and several contributed modules so that a reader who is new to Drupal will learn much more than just theming.
