WhoIsKevin

In my continued quest to increase my Drupal 6 knowledge I picked up this book on module development for version 6.

Over all this is an excellent book. This is definitely targeted more at a developer which is probably why I liked this book. I think the author does a great job of explaining the basics of how Drupal works and specifically covers a lot of information on hooks which are key to understanding how to accomplish most any task in Drupal.
The modules that are developed through the book are well chosen because they cover the essential pieces of module development and at the same time allow a little time for some more advanced topics. I was surprised at how well the theming code was covered in this book. Most module development books usually leave all the user interface development out but this book shows how you implement your module in a way to take advantage of the theming capabilities in Drupal.
Over all this is a great book and if you are familiar with Drupal a great way to either learn about module development or get up to speed on some of the Drupal 6 changes to modules.

Just finished reading While America Aged by Roger Lowenstein. While this book can sometime drag with large numbers of details about various players in past pension negotiations I can still highly recommend this book.
If you think the failures of large American car companies are an isolated incident then this is a must read. Mr Lowenstein describes how these events repeated with the New York Subways and the City of San Diego. Unfortunately for all of us this paints a sad future for most governments and of course the biggest pension system of all Social Security. The last chapter hints at some easy ways to help prevent this but those methods are easy just difficult in our political climate to make happen. He mentions the push to Government supported healthcare as well as an attempt by President Bush to stop borrowing against Social Security. Of course both these measures have never achieved support.
A good informative read that I can highly recommend.

Just finished reading “Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6” by David Mercer from Packt Publishing.


This is a general beginners book for Drupal and web development in general. Overall I’d say it is a good book for those wanting to learn about Drupal. My biggest issue is with some of the more generic advice on how to develop a site or how to decide about what you want your site to do. These are just extra elements that I think should be left to a different book.
Still I’d recommend this book if you are interested in learning about how Drupal works and whether you can use it for your site. Combine it with a book on module development that I am currently reading and you have a good round view of the basics of Drupal.