Drupal 6: The missing manual

For those who haven't noticed yet, the latest in a expected long line of Drupal books for this year has been published: David Mercer's verbosely-named "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6". It is not a book for the experienced Drupaler; it's target market is people picking up Drupal, and the web for that matter, for the very first time.

Personally I think David has done a great job with it, but then I am biased; I was the tech reviewer for the book. :-) If you want an unbiased opinion, pick up a copy yourself and give it a read. Then you'll know how good it is. As an added bonus, 5% of all sales through Packt's web site are donated to the Drupal Association. Everybody wins!

Of course, there's always post-publication jitters about whether or not we got something wrong, especially since catching those was supposed to be my job. I will apologize in advance for anything I missed, and plead "we were working with a beta!" 11Heavens has already written an extensive review, and it looks like we did miss a few things, but overall it seems a positive review. Whew!

One of these days I'll have the bandwidth to write a book myself, but in the meantime being a tech reviewer is rewarding as well. Getting to see a book about the web's best software </bias> come together is exciting all on its own, but helping to shape it and get first-crack at ferreting out bugs makes it all the more interesting. It's like working on Drupal itself; whatever you do will affect thousands of people using the software you're writing or the book you're writing or reviewing. That's both awesome and frightening at the same time.