I agree for the most part with Angela. I started Piece mail learning drupal and just didn't get what Drupal was doing so at best I was copy and past code segments not understanding why they worked. I read Pro Drupal Development and it helped some but I found that "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development" layed it out how things worked together for me and taught me the basics and showed me real world ways of doing things something Pro Drupal Development didn't do. Don't get me wrong I now reference both book and for something Pro Drupal Development is great but to me it is more a reference book for the most common commands then a good book to teach you the in's and out's of Drupal. Thanks Robert Angela Byron wrote:
Marjorie Roswell wrote:
Seriously, would love to basically tackle this learning curve in a logical way, based on how often something appears in code, ideally in both core and contrib, combned.
Honestly, the best way to tackle the Drupal development learning curve is just to shell out 30 smackers for Pro Drupal Development (use the "Buy" link at http://www.drupalbook.com/; the Drupal Association gets a little bit of a cut).
Trying to learn functions piecemeal like that is going to leave you with a bit of a "swiss cheese" understanding of how things fit together, and further frustration as you go along. PDD is great because it guides you "top down" through all of Drupal's various sub-systems. I'd been developing with Drupal heavily for over 2 years when I first read it and it still managed to cement a bunch of fundamentals for me and really help me see how everything fit together.
The one caveat is that there's a 2nd edition due out in late August on Drupal 6. So you'll probably end up re-buying the book again in the fall if you buy it now. However, my guess is that if you could cut the time spent suffering the Drupal learning curve by 1000 hours, you can probably make that $30 up in a quick dash of client work real soon. ;)
Also, I've not had a chance to really sit down and read it yet, but in paging through, the book "Learning Drupal 6 Module Development" looks like it would be a good second book to pick up once you get the concepts in PDD down and want to start actually building things.
-Angie