[Packt] Publishing sent me a copy of the Drupal 6 book to review. Slowly but surely, I've consumed the book from the start to the finish. In many ways, this book is designed for the beginner. It makes no assumptions of experience with PHP or MySQL. It isn't designed as a book to teach you CSS nor does it assume you know CSS. This book is more of an administrative handbook that takes you from initially setting up a local instance of Drupal 6, through the basics of how to use "out of the box" Drupal functionality. You do need to know the basics of using a Web browser and it does assume you will be able to set up an *AMP stack on your local machine.

David Mercer has an easy conversational style of writing that makes reading his book a pleasure. He makes Drupal non-threatening and takes the reader from the most basic concepts through some of Drupal's more esoteric features. The book is broken into ten chapters plus an appendix on deployment.

Chapter 1 is a basic overview of what Drupal is, who makes up the community, where you can get help, and what you can expect from the book. It underscores that Drupal should not be intimidating, period. Anyone can learn the basics of Drupal--Drupal administration and configuration.

Chapter 2 covers creating a site locally, starting to configure using Drupal core (the software "out of the box"), installation issues you might run into, and a good introductory tour of the software.

Chapter 3 looks at contributed modules. A good portion of this chapter talks about the fact many modules have not been ported from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6--and this is still the case. My recollection of the shift from 4-5 had modules being ported more quickly. Part of this impression might be how slowly Views, a cornerstone of Drupal development these days, has been moved to 6. It seems that a final version is close to being released after major refactoring, but an alternative for those wanting to move to Drupal 6 now might be John Fiala's Simplelist.

Chapter 4 is an overview of Drupal administration.

Chapter 5 starts explaining the power of Roles. Drupal 6, like previous versions of Drupal, has a powerful permissioning system that allows for subtle, but significant control over how content can be added to your site. It really is a discussion of users and user control.

Chapter 6 discusses the beginnings of content. On every site, content is king. Your content will dictate how valuable your site is to others and, ultimately, how much traffic is directed to your site. This chapter gives a strong basis in the concept of content types--blog, forum, page, book, and so forth. Often the differences between content types is subtle and sometimes it is only the intent of a content type that makes the differences really obvious. The chapter reviews the general use of content and then looks at different modules that can extend your content types easily.

Chapter 7 begins exploring advanced content. It covers the beginnings of using HTML, PHP, and CSS. It reviews the use of Taxonomy--how content is categorized--which is one of the most powerful aspects of Drupal. It looks a the Content Construction Kit (CCK), a way to create custom content types without having to know how to program. This chapter looks at the *management* of content on your site.

Chapter 8 begins a look at themes and how a custom theme can give you a unique look and feel--something that can build brand awareness. You don't want your site to just look like Garland do you? This chapter reviews a theme's anatomy if you want to build a theme from scratch but it also covers modifying a contributed theme rather than building a theme from scratch.

Chapter 9 takes the reader through Open ID, actions and triggers, language support, simple methods to improve performance and goes on to touch on jQuery.

This book is ideal for the new Drupal user who wants to learn the nuts and bolts of Drupal. It can act as a great reference book for those who need to support a Drupal 6 site on a day to day basis. I personally enjoyed reading the book and have recommended it to others who have expressed a desire to learn more about Drupal.