Book Review: Drupal 6 Site Blueprints

Drupal 6 Site Blueprints is a pretty quick read, coming in at just under 250 pages.  The book is good - I personally got a lot out of this book, but I think I fit into this book's relatively small target audience (advanced Drupal newbie).  The title chosen for the book is perfect.  The author didn't use the word "recipe", or "cookbook", he used "blueprints".  When you have a recipe, you get a list of ingredients as well as some very specific instructions on how to combine them all together.  It tells you everything you need to know to get from A to Z, and assumes no pre-existing knowledge.

When you get a blueprint (like a blueprint to a building), you are recieve a document that explains to someone "in the know" how that particular building has been assembled.  While someone with experience will have no problem gleaning the information they need from a blueprint, someone who's never wielded a hammer might not know how to read it properly.

That's exactly what this book is - a series of blueprints for building sites with Drupal.  People who have never used Drupal before might be overwhelmed by this book, as it skips over some of the things that a book geared more for Drupal beginners would go into detail about.  However, if you know how to setup Drupal, install modules, and are familiar with how Drupal's roles and permissions interact, this book is for you.  This book at no point requires you to write PHP or do any of your own theming.

Timi offers up a fictitious (and often humorous) site design at the beginning of each of 12 chapters.  He first lays out what core and contrib modules will be used.  He then goes into the specific configurations for the site, and then finishes up with the theme used for the site.

Here's a list of the site blueprints provided in each chapter:

1. Building a Personal Site
2. Building a School Site
3. Building an Aficionado's Site
4. Building an Events Site
5. Building a Community Site
6. Building a Newspaper Site
7. Building an E-commerce Site
8. Building a Directory Site
9. Building a Photo Sharing Site
10. Building a Conference Facilities Booking Site
11. Building a Google Map Site
12. Building a News Aggregating Site

All in all, this book was a quick read for me, and will remain on my bookshelf as a handy reference.  There were no huge "OMG, that's how you do that!!!" moments, but there were a bunch of cases where I took note of Timi's way of building something.  Given the good price, and the two evening of reading that it took to finish it, I would say this book is no-brainer for any Drupal user to add to their collection. I give it a four out of five - it does what it advertises to do, and does it well.