9 Drush links to take you from beginner to advanced.

Over the past couple years Drush has become an essential part of the Drupal site builder's toolkit. I personally use it daily and like a lot of developers now couldn't imagine building a site without it! (Well, I suppose I could imagine it, but I can also imagine building sites in Drupal 4.6, and it's not pretty ;) ).

Drush is one of those areas of Drupal that has been very well documented and I think it would be useful to compile what I feel are some of the more appropriate areas for site builders. There are many awesome webcasts, though I'm personally biased against them due to my forever inconsistent connection speeds while I'm traveling, so don't take it personally if I pass your webcast by :). Most of the existing documentation is written for D6, but fortunately Drush is Drupal version agnostic so all D6 documentation should work almost identically to D7.

Beginning with Drush

Drush.ws

First of all, one of the best, most comprehensive resources I've found is the official Drush website itself, drush.ws. It contains the full API for all versions as well as examples and other documentation. Having said this though, I wouldn't specifically recommend it as a starting point for new users.

Introduction to Drush

One of the best introductory write-ups I've found was on the 2tbsp blog. It covers everything from installing to basic commands and even touches on site aliases. If you haven't used Drush yet, this is a great starting point.

Drupalize.me

I realize I just got over stating how I don't like webcasts, but I'll make an exception for lullabot's :). Drupalize.me has made a series of videos introducing Drush. If you haven't used Drush much, this is another great starting point. The downside is that only the first two videos are free and the rest you'll need to register for. If all you're looking for are Drush tutorials then it may not be worth it.

Drupal.org

Of course this list would not be complete without a link back to the great documentation on this topic on Drupal.org. The d.o Drush documentation covers mainly introductory Drush knowledge along with some more advanced topics such as synchronizing sites using Drush.

Intermediate to advanced

Integrating your modules

This past May Code Karate posted a good article on getting started with integrating your modules with Drush. It covers the important drush hooks as well as some key drush functions needed to get Drush support into your modules.

Drush synchonization with aliases

I've found a couple of posts on using aliases to handle a dev / production workflow but the one from level ten was my favourite. If you're looking for a quick solution to a time old Drupal problem, using aliases with Drush is definitely the way to go. Just to add to this, using SSH keys between your server and localhost for passwordless authentication may make your life easier.

Development Seed

Though no longer a Drupal shop, they've still got a lot of great resources on their site for this kind of stuff. When Drush 3 was released Adrian Rossouw posted an article detailing some of the new functionality of Drush. Even though Drush is officially at V4 now I believe everything in Adrian's post is still quite relevent.

Drush make

The Drush Make plugin for Drush written by Dmitri Gaskin is another key tool in the platform builder's toolkit. I would even go so far as to say an essential tool. Jared Stoneberg wrote a post on his Stoneberg Design blog a while back that I thought looked particularly useful on creating and using Drush make files. As an aside, Jared is also working on his own Drupal platform for restaurant websites called Aioli.

Also, one of the best places to look for beginner to advanced help on Drush topics (and Drush Make) is in the code itself. It contains plenty of great examples for doing almost everything you'll want to do with the tool.

If you know of other Drush resources you've found particularly useful please let me know in the comments.