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Beginner's Guide to Drupal 7 Fields

Beginner's Guide to Drupal 7 Fields

Posted on: Friday, December 9th 2011 by Ben

As someone new to Drupal I was given a book to read and review from the team at Appnovation. The title is Drupal 7 Fields/CCK by Dave Poon, and with this post I will cover some initial impressions as I read through the first few chapters.

This book is a beginners guide to Drupal 7 and is aimed at an audience who doesn't have too much experience working with Drupal or code, although some experience is recommended. What I really liked about it is that the author thoroughly explains how the book is structured and what the end results of the project are. This helps to orient the reader and reinforce how the author intends to teach the material.

The first step is a set of instructions, with specific references, such as adding a custom field type. Following that is a a plain language explanation of what happens when you add a field. This is a great technique to explain what happens behind the scenes when you are working with the GUI. The next step is a quick quiz based on the steps just completed. Finally, there is a challenge to apply those steps on your own and experiment with the wide variety of options.

Throughout the book, the reader is working up to a complete site built with Fields. The example used is a cooking site and this provides a fun background as you work your way through it. So far, I have gone through the first quarter and I can already see the benefits of the instructions. While it is basic, it does a great job explaining how Drupal works with custom content types and how they can be used to build a wide variety of sites. This is all important knowledge for a beginner and with my next post I will share some of the more advanced techniques covered.

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