Pro Drupal Development book review

Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate

This book is a good start. It is ideal for someone who wants to quickly learn Drupal Development without spending a lot of time reading a book.

Pro: It has short chapters so you can quickly read through the book. I read every chapter.
Con: It has short chapters so it doesn't go into nearly enough detail.

I'd like a follow up book that was twice as long and went into more thorough examples.
At the end of each chapter, I felt it had just touched the tip of the iceberg. When I ventured out on my own with a more complicated example, I felt lost about many details.

The book has self-contained examples in each chapter. That was a good approach for a short introduction to each topic. The book also does a good job of referring you to the specific drupal.org node for more information.

In a follow-up book, it'd be more beneficial to develop an entire Drupal project that built upon
the previous chapter's code.

The book had much errata. If you bought the book early, this would have been quite frustrating. My printed version seemed to have the corrections. However the downloaded source code to
the book does not have all the corrections. You may have to examine the code and compare it to what is printed in the book.

The last few chapters of the book are perhaps the best. They give you best practices for writing secure code, writing code the Drupal way, and optimizing Drupal.

The book was beneficial and I'm sure I'll be using it as a reference -- until a more encyclopedic book comes along.