Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellant Start
Comment: I was really struggling with understanding Drupal before I read this book. This book laid out what I needed to know in a step by step manner that was easy for me to understand.
For example, I was having a hard time understanding how I could reference a page of content. How do you know what node number it is anyway? This book explained it to me.
There are many more advanced topics that I am sure will come in handy as I use Drupal more.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent - Very Helpful
Comment: I am a Web developer/designer in the process learning Drupal for a personal project; a very large and complex community site. This book has been invaluable in this process. Drupal.org and Drupal's online community in combination with this book have quickly gotten me up-to-speed with what I need to know in order to create this complex community site. I'm grateful to the author for this excellent work.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good Drupal Introduction
Comment: I found the book to be a good introduction to Drupal. Despite Mercer's best efforts, I don't recommend Drupal to anyone who is unfamiliar with web publishing. I think it would be too much information to absorb at one time. I have enjoyed working with Drupal 6.2 and this book allowed me to learn and appreciate it fairly quickly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for the intrepid newcomer
Comment: An update to David Mercer's now two year old Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites, this version has been updated for the CMS' latest revision and guides the user through from setting up a development environment and installing drupal through to building custom themes and deploying a fully built site.
The book is designed to be read sequentially and assumes very little prior Drupal knowledge, though a little familiarity with the interface would be helpful, and a lot of willingness to explore and experiment are going to be necessary for complete newcomers. The first few chapters-focussed on explaining the benefits of using drupal and guide the user through the initial setup-are a little clunky and may deter those not comfortable with installing databases and scripting languages. The style improves as the book progresses and Mercer covers his topics well, with a considerably better structure than several Packt publications I've seen lately. (sadly the book retains Packt's )
Some of those topics are fairly complex and it might have been good to have a few more directions for exploring the power of taxonomies and getting to grip with best practices in designing them. Given the range of documentation (on blogs and elsewhere) available online, more references to resources outside the book would have been a useful addition. But the fact that Mercer takes users beyond the very basics is to his credit, and it's very good to see coverage of jquery, CCK, caching, and other topics that are key to recent versions of drupal but which could easily have been glossed over.
This is not a book for the seasoned developer coming from another platform or for those who have already have ample drupal experience (others have that covered) and it's not really the "user manual" I'd like to find to hand on to drupal-using clients. But for those with an itch to build their own site and a sense that drupal might be the right tool, this volume is well worth a look.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to Drupal
Comment: I am relatively new to Drupal and have read all the Drupal books in the last 2-3 months. This the best one and the most appropriate one for the beginner/intermediate person who wants to install and use Drupal to build a website. It is not so much geared to developers or themers, except maybe as a most basic intro. But if you are considering useing Drupal as a platform for your company's website or whatever, this is a good place to start. Probably the best place I know of.
That said, it is not sufficient and you will need to refer often to the drupal.org website as well, to get the real story on things as you get into building out your site.
One important point regarding installation of Drupal. As in his first book, he recommends using Apache2Triad to get your Apache/PHP/mySQL environment. I did this (using his first book) and it is a BAD IDEA. As I learned, A2T is very old (2 yrs+), is not likley to be updated anytime soon (see the A2T website for confirmation), provides practically no support, and has a rapidly diminishing community of users. There are many and much better options - such as XAMPP - and I recommend you use one of them instead. The install process and resulting functionality is much the same, so the book is still helpful. Just don't use the specific package he recommends.
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