Drupal 5 Themes
I’m extremely impressed with Drupal 5 Themes. I received this book just after finishing coding three custom themes for clients – so Drupal themeing was definitely on my brain! The book is written for non-technical designers, not programmers. However, experienced programmers could find real value in this book - particularly if the programmers are new to Drupal. This book has some of the clearest, easiest to understand explanations of Drupal. If you spent much time reading the Drupal documentation, you will really appreciate the author’s writing style. I’ll be teaching Drupal soon, and I’m considering using this book as part of the course.
I like the structure of the book. After providing an excellent overview of Drupal, the first major exercise is modifying an existing Drupal theme. That is how most people start off learning how to theme anyway, but with this guide they should have a much better idea of what they are doing than most beginning theme designers. The second major assignment is for the programmer to design a theme from scratch. After completing both of these assignments, the reader should have tremendous confidence that they will be able to design a theme.
I wish the author had written about CCK and views modules. They are important to many sites, and his writing style would have been a welcome addition to the documentation.