Pro Drupal Development
VanDyk

£22.09

buy from amazon

This is one of the best technical books I have read in a while.

It assumes that you already know PHP (which makes sense given the 'Pro' in the title) and it doesn't even use up space telling you how to download and install Drupal.

Instead it concentrates its 400 odd pages on telling you stuff that isn't readily available elsewhere: in a concise, easy to read, format.

I find it gets the balance between theory and example just right, so that you end up understanding why something works the way it does - and how to implement it.

The book makes great use of screenshots, flowcharts, schema diagrams, and  tables - these really aid rapid understanding of what is a complex system.

Once you have the book you can get the pdf version pretty cheaply, I find having the book to browse and the pdf for instead reference a great combination.

The book concentrates mainly on core Drupal and how to extend it: I'd love to see another book doing the same thing for some of the main contributed modules.