Learning Drupal 6 Module Development - A Review

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Packt Press was kind enough to send me a copy of "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development" by Matt Butcher. After being slightly disappointed with their Drupal 6 Themes offering, I find this book to be a superb introduction to building modules in Drupal 6. I usually approach Drupal as a themer so module development is somewhat new to me (although I have written a few small glue modules).

The book assumes you are at least somewhat familiar with Drupal and have Drupal 6 installed and running. The first chapter then introduces you to fundamental Drupal concepts like nodes, users, blocks, regions and menus.

Chapters 2 and 3 then dive right in to making a module for displaying your bookshelf for Goodreads.com. I love the practical, hands on approach. This sounded like fun so I dove in and started making the module. You can see my slightly customized version the result over on the top of the left sidebar of this site.

Subsequent chapters cover important Drupal APIs such as making your module themable, Jquery, Ajax, Json, the Form API, Mail API, Filters, Actions, and the last chapter covers Install Profiles, which I am looking forward to trying.

Working through the examples in the book will make you a very functional Drupal module developer because you actually build 4 modules and cover all the major APIs. I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to the aspiring Drupal module developer.

Butcher's book helped me,

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2009-12-14 16:03.

Butcher's book helped me, too. A lot of it adapts examples from the Drupal site with essentially cosmetic changes. But Butcher is a grad student in philosophy and his disciplined thought shows in the well organized text. I think the book is a real time-saver.

Thanks for your excellent site, too.