Product Description

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the father of the Internet), Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

Drupal is an elegantly designed, well-supported and flexible platform that anyone can use in order to create their own website. With such a powerful tool at your fingertips there is no longer any need to pay professionals to design a site when you can do the same job yourself absolutely free. All it takes is a bit of practice!

This book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from knowing you want a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Experienced technical author David Mercer expertly guides the reader through all the stages of building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner. Aimed in particular at beginners to Drupal, this book will allow readers to advance rapidly up the learning curve to the point where they can tackle any problem with confidence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13758 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 380 pages

About the Author

David Mercer was born in August 1976 in Harare, Zimbabwe. Having always had a strong interest in science, David came into regular contact with computers at university where he graduated cum laude with majors in applied math and math (although he minored in computer science).

As a programmer and professional writer who has been writing both code and books for about nine years, he has worked on a number of well known titles, in various capacities, on a wide variety of topics. His books have sold tens of thousands of copies and have been translated into over 6 different languages to date.

David finds that the challenges arising from the dichotomous relationship between the science (and art) of software programming and the art (and science) of writing is what keeps his interest in producing books piqued. He will no doubt continue to write professionally in the future.

David balances his time between programming, reviewing, writing, and contributing to interesting web-based projects such as RankTracer and LinkDoozer. When he isn't working (which isn't that often) he enjoys playing guitar (generally on stage and unrehearsed) and getting involved in outdoor activities ranging from touch rugby and golf to water skiing and snowboarding.

Customer Reviews

Drupal 6, David Mercer, Packt
This is a good book to read even if you read Drupal 5 by the same author/publisher. It is a beginning level book but covers the new features nicely. This book assumes you do not know HTML or PHP.
The illustrations of the dialog screens are very helpful. There is a very nice one of cpanel and phpMyAdmin although they are not part of Drupal, they can be used for back-ups of your Drupal website.
This is a nice book to put on your bookshelf and get down when a problem comes up that needs to be fixed right away.

OK, not fabulous
I found this a reasonable overview of Drupal with a fair amount of information on the topics of online support/documentation, installation and system management. It wasn't as deep as I would have liked regarding actual website design within the Drupal framework. Although there's enough to get you started, it didn't cover what I need to know, such as using categories to build selections of content. I was also disappointed at its Windows-centric approach, skipping Unix and Mac environments. Overall, I would have been happier with this book at half the hefty price charged for it.

IMPORTANT: Check your book pages total
Inspect the book that you receive from Amazon carefully -- check total pages against the TOC. There are defective books circulating. They look identical to the "correct" books -- in thickness and even with respect to the Production Reference in the inside cover. However, the defective book has some 40 pages missing!

Amazon first sent me a book that was incomplete, and then followed with a replacement book that likewise was incomplete. (Took 1 month and three attempts before I ever saw a complete book.)