Foreword

There are many Drupal books out there vying for your hard-earned money. From site building to theming to module development, there are books out there that specialize in whatever area of Drupal you might be interested in.

This book, on the other hand, is one of a kind. Its aim is to expose you to all facets of Drupal, in many cases from the very experts who helped author them. There is material here for literally all levels of Drupal experience and interest.

The book starts with introductory material about getting up and running quickly with a simple site and how to extend it with some of Drupal's most popular contributed modules. There are also chapters on how to make your Drupal site not look like a Drupal site with both beginning and advanced theming and jQuery for front-end development. You'll learn how to customize Drupal through module development, for use cases that go beyond what the vast library of contributed projects can do, as well as how to port Drupal 6 modules to Drupal 7 and how to add automated tests to ensure your code stays working. And for the ?bergeeks out there, there's information on utilizing Drupal from the command line and pairing it with Git, and managing server deployments and performance. There's even material about more wide-reaching topics that expand far beyond Drupal, such as project management, creating documentation for your web site, and user experience.

Found throughout are best practice recommendations and tales of battle directly from the field, from a truly all-star cast of some of the biggest, brightest, and most innovative minds in the Drupal community. As the co-maintainer or Drupal 7, I'm incredibly excited to see this enormous body of work come together. Bravo to Benjamin and the rest of the authoring team!

Angela Byron (webchick)
Drupal 7 Maintainer