Introduction
As with anything else you do, it’s important to start at the beginning. So . . . what is Drupal? Drupal is an open source project that allows community-shared code to be assembled to quickly make web sites for any purpose. Drupal is used to power web sites for the White House, Warner Brothers, 30% of all universities and colleges (Babson, where I have been working and teaching, is using it extensively now as well), the Louvre, Zynga, PayPal, Chris Rock, The House of Representatives, Led Zeppelin, and many more big-name sites. Using the power of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) technologies and open source, Drupal can accelerate any technology project, web site, or startup to get up and running fast and for a fraction of the cost. Whether you’re creating blogs, wikis, corporate home pages, e-commerce sites, or collaborative communities, Drupal can do all of this—and more—very well. And it’s free to download and free to use whether you’re using Windows or a Mac! If you want to see the impact Drupal is making, check out the site http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites, which exhibits many of the top businesses and organizations that are using and contributing to Drupal.
What You’ll Learn in This Book
Drupal 8 for Absolute Beginners will introduce you to everything you need to start your journey toward becoming a great Drupal developer, or just a plain old good web developer. Most of the skills presented are applicable whether your primary content management system is Drupal or WordPress, or whether your primary programming language is Java, Ruby, or PHP. This book will give you the tools you need to continue to grow as a web programmer, whether for a career as a software engineer or just to understand one of the pivotal technologies in the world today.
This book starts off by teaching you how to install Drupal. Then the book teaches you to do some “site building,” which is a term in the Drupal community referring to building awesome Drupal sites without needing to program much if at all, just by using community-contributed add-on modules, themes, and core Drupal itself. Finally, you’ll learn how to program—you’ll learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP—and then you’ll see how to use that knowledge to further extend and customize Drupal. By the end of this book, if you practice along and work hard, you’ll be primed to become a Drupal rock star in an industry hungry for new talent. At a recent education Drupal summit, we voted on groups to break up into, and the largest group by far was the “how to attract and train Drupal talent” discussion group.
This book will help you achieve the following objectives:
- Create web sites using Drupal.
- Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to theme Drupal.
- Learn about the LAMP stack.
- Extend and tailor Drupal with the programming skills previously mentioned.
This book will not teach you every bit of HTML, nor will it teach you every bit of CSS, PHP, MYSQL, or Apache. But it will teach you absolutely enough so you will be empowered to easily learn the details on your own. If you know how to make text blue with CSS you can easily use the same concepts to make the text bright purple, and to make the text a bit larger in headers, and so on. My point is, you simply need a primer, and this book is exactly that. If I forget the syntax to float an element to the left, and have text float around that picture on the right, I look it up. But I know how to look it up, I know where to look it up, I have enough of a background that I can read any technical writing and figure out what I need to get done, and I have enough background so that even though I’m usually more of a back-end programmer in my job role, I can easily double as a themer and decorate a page to mimic designs I’ve been asked to implement for web pages. The point is, this book is a primer, giving you enough, teaching you to fish, and teaching you where to go to get work done. After I’ve taught you enough so you get the primary concepts for a web technology I’ll provide links to info on the rest of the details, links that I often have used and continue to use. Even when you know this stuff, you will use the Internet as your manual to get exact syntax, or to remember how to use a command.
KEEPING UP WITH TECHNOLOGY
Before you take on any new skill, it’s important to understand why you’re doing it or how that skill might take you further in your career. In the Drupal classes I teach, I’ve been starting off by showing this great video: http://youtu.be/nKIu9yen5nc. This clip is an awesome video from some famous people exposing how important technology skills are today, and the video highlights that those with knowledge of how to program are “rock stars” in today’s working world. The future is now, and I hope this video will inspire you to work hard to learn.
I also should call attention to this page on code.org: http://code.org/stats. Note that even today there is a tremendous shortfall of programmers—and as of this writing it’s expected that there will be 1,000,000 more jobs requiring programming skills than students by 2020. I firmly believe that every young person should learn basic programming skills. Programming is an awesome tool to have in your tool chest and should be as ubiquitous as a hammer or screwdriver. Programming skills fetch the highest-paying salaries for young graduates, as the http://code.org/stats page points out.
I love the quote from Einstein, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Having deep knowledge of programming I often feel like one of the most useful people in a company boardroom, and the joy of feeling useful, higher wages, and great jobs and companies looking to attract my skills makes it quite a worthwhile endeavor to learn this stuff.
Ready, Set . . . Let’s Learn
So. . . get yourself into a good, comfy chair, ideally with your computer in front of you, and let’s learn some Drupal. I’m confident that this book will jump-start many careers, and I have evidence of this already, having succeeded in getting internships and jobs for many of my students in the Boston area with some top companies that provide Drupal services. I’m excited to be able to contribute toward helping folks learn the skills to find and maintain great careers in the technology space.