Given the success of David Mercer's first Drupal title for beginners, Packt has published a new and improved edition to go with the latest release of Drupal. The new book, still targetted at beginners and intermediates, builds on its predecessor to provide a steeper launching ramp for everyone who still feels they're not yet a pro.

Changes to the new version include:

• Slimmed down writing, to provide faster flowing and more concentrated information
• Updates to all the original text to reflect the enhanced features of D6
• Vastly expanded the range of topics
• Increased the depth and level of coverage for many topics

Despite the fact that I have cut out quite a bit of the old text and trimmed that which remained, the new version is over 330 pages. This gives you an idea of how much new material went into this edition in order to bring it up to speed with this most impressive of Drupal releases. This new book is as much an overhaul of the last as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

I hope that this title will meet the following goals that I have personally set for it:

1. To help lower the intellectual "price of admission" into the Drupal fan club
2. To encourage people outside the community to join by providing quality informative content that really enhances the learning process and reduces the learning time
3. To provide a great companion for new Drupal users and raise their basic level of competency to a stage where they can begin tackling ambitious and advanced projects
4. To raise even more money for the Drupal community through Packt's donation scheme - they recently announced that their tally now exceeds $100 000 in funds raised for open source projects, so congratulations to them.
5. To become the Drupal community's de facto title for learning the technology - from here readers can specialize into their own topics of interest such as module or theme development utilizing the more specialized and advanced titles available

This book is available immediately from the Packt website in both hardcopy and eBook format. It will also be available on Amazon and many other bookstores around the world shortly.

Please visit http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-create-powerful-websites/book for a more in-depth view of the content and a sample chapter.

I sincerely hope you all find this a valuable addition to this great Open Source Project, and, with your support we can help to ensure that Drupal continues to move from strength to strength.

Regards,
David Mercer
Author: Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6

Drupal version: Drupal 6.x