I admit, I'm not much of a reader. Well, I take that back. I'm not much of a book reader. The super-dry stuff that people automatically hate like laws and the court cases that interpret them are pretty enjoyable for me. In fact, there's some cool little gems in a lot of them, especially when you come across a certain Supreme Court Justice that has no problem making sarcastic remarks in response to a lawyer's oral argument.

Now in learning how to do stuff, I'm one of those that learns by doing and through trial and error. But with Drupal 7, I decided I might try to read a couple of books on it to see what I had missed.

So I picked up two books from Amazon: Foundation Drupal 7 and Pro Drupal 7 Development . I'll review the former in this post because I am just starting to read the latter.

Foundation Drupal 7 is obviously intended for beginners. So if you're someone who already has one or two Drupal websites under your belt, much of the content will likely be stuff that you already know. However, it's very good to review what you think you know because you might find a few gems that you don't know.

The book starts with introducing you to what Drupal is and how to find and set up a web host to support Drupal. What I found here that helps me is a different approach to introducing someone to Drupal. As I said in my post about my goals and resolutions for this year, I'm a geeky introvert. My social skills lack quite a bit, and I find myself stumbling over expaining technical things to non-technical people sometimes. What the introduction in this book showed me was a much later starting point to introducing Drupal to someone who has never heard of it.

Next, the book gets into setting up a basic Drupal website. Of course 99% of this was stuff I already knew, but there were a few hidden gems that helped me in two ways. First, there were a couple of modules mentioned that I hadn't found before that, after setting them up on a development version of a Drupal 7 site I am currently working on, I don't think I will go without on future websites. Second, I found better ways to provide documentation for clients managing a Drupal website. On my first couple of websites, I admittedly did the bad practice of training without providing documentation. Now, I provide detailed documentation tailored to that specific website. But the book showed me a couple of things that I had taken for granted and a couple more things that I needed to improve my wording on (you know, translate better).

The final three chapters contain information that nearly everyone using Drupal will directly benefit from.

Then in chapter 10, the book gets into going live with a new Drupal website. Basically, it describes the development and launch process I already use in a bit more detail. But I recommend to anyone doing their first couple of Drupal websites to read chapter 10 at least twice.

Chapter 11 introduces the new Update Manager, which currently has limited functionality. One of the biggest complaints about Drupal has been the lack of an automatic update. Drupal 7 is almost there, and Drupal 8 will likely have it. But the chapter also goes into detail on the normal way to update a Drupal website over SSH and how to properly create a staging or testing site to make sure the updates won't break your production site.

If you're in the Drupal business, then chapter 12 is a must read. Chapter 12 goes over things that will not only help you make the best decisions for your clients, but will also help you better inform your clients.

Finally, the Appendices at the end go over a few things that will help anyone involved with a Drupal website. Appendix A covers some much needed information about search engine optimization. This is obviously limited to the stuff that the web developer should be doing and not what your copy editor should do. It goes over some modules that help Drupal do all of this for you.

Appendix B provides an introduction to Drush. Drush is a command line tool that helps you manage your Drupal websites. If you enjoy using the command line to do your tasks (as I do... who really needs cPanel?), you'll be head over heels for Drush. This is very strongly recommended for anyone who manages more than a few Drupal websites.

Appendix C gives you a list of modules that the author prefers for various tasks, while Appendix D shows you some common recipes that you will likely use in Views. The more experienced Drupal developers will skim over this, but I recommend that beginners read this thoroughly. These two appendices are also a very good reason to keep the book on your bookshelf.

Overall, I give Foundation Drupal 7 a 4-star rating. The loss of one star was due to some editing errors, particularly with captions on screenshots. For example, figures 11-8, 11-11, and 11-12 all have the same caption while clearly doing different things. Better attention to detail would have gotten that elusive fifth star.