Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook - Review

I was pretty psyched to get a copy of Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook to review. It’s written by Karthik Kumar and published by Packt Publishing. So without further adieu, here are my thoughts. There is a statement on the first few introductory pages about assuming the reader is familiar with Drupal Installation and has a basic understanding of PHP. I was glad to see this as sometimes I’ve gotten books that are way beyond my capabilities and didn’t know it till 60 pages into it.

Who’s it for?

The is written to help Drupal developers and designers customize their site visually. Drupal does have a learning curve for designers so this book could be a great place to start. The layout and hierarchy of the calls to action throughout the book make it easy to follow. You can scan the books pages quickly to find the tutorial starting point. After you’ve stepped through the tutorial there are more callouts such as “How it works” and “There’s More”.

What’s in it?

The content overall is very helpful in going further than just using Drupal’s user interface to add, change and delete content and configuration. The chapter about Development and Debugging Tools (Ch5) gives the foundation for some solid investigate tools (namely the Devel module). I appreciated seeing chapters with descriptive titles. Sometimes I see tutorial books with chapter names filled with puns or a bad play on words (which does nothing for a reader scanning for a particular subject).

I like the quick bullet listing at the Chapters’ start of the overall lesson as well. A Views Theming Chapter and an “Advanced Templating” Chapter stood out as ones to bookmark for reference. The book’s only downside is the content organization. And this is my opinion, but I would like to see all the things that can be edited through the user interface towards the front of the book, and the Javascript and PHP towards the back of the book. The “Customizing CCK” Chapter and “Rapid Layout with Panels” seem to more basic than custom templating and adding javascript snippets that are in earlier chapters.

Last Words

I’d recommend this book to web designers wanting to dive deeper than the standard user interface tools available in Drupal. I’d also suggest having a basic understanding of php and some javascript knowledge as well.