Reddit reviews The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7

I came to Drupal from the ground-up, rather than top-down. After I got past the Drupal learning curve, I discovered a lot of flexibility and reusable components... and lots of anti-patterns. With that said, especially for the more popular extensions, there's a reason for their popularity. Just because it's different from what you're used to doesn't mean it's bad.

Do look for modules. Don't just install every module you find; figure out the functional requirements are and test critically.

Yes, there may be a module for it, but is it supported? How many people downloaded it? Is it actively developed? Does it even work? Does it conflict with anything?

If you can grok the 5 lines of code that you need from a throwaway contrib module to perform a task and add it cleanly as part of your custom code, just do it - comment to cite and move on.

Yes, there are plenty of UIs, and some of them are pretty horrid. First thing I do is disable overlay, for example. You don't have to use them.

There's drush, which is a fantastic CLI interface, which facilitates a lot of back-end tasks. I strongly recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1430231351 is a great book for getting started with Drupal 7 development, not "site building".

Hang out in IRC, #drupal-contrib and #pantheon on freenode for example if you want to talk shop.

Welcome aboard! Looks like you've got some reading to do.

• Using Drupal a guide to quickly start you on getting ramped up with general usage and site administration tasks.
  
• Pro Drupal 7 Development is an excellent resource for beginning developers with some PHP knowledge trying to get a handle on how to write Drupal modules.
  
• The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 when you're ready, this book will fill in a lot of the gaps left by Pro Drupal 7 Development.
  
• If you're also going to be handling front end development (styling the site and the like) you will want to get your hands on some reference material on Drupal site theming. I don't have a specific recommendation here so I'm hoping a themer will chime in.
  
  
  You might also consider installing Drush in your site hosting and development environments. It provides commandline tools to automate common tasks and is a great thing to have in your toolbox.
  
  One thing I would stress is to not be in a hurry to write code when just getting started. If you're new to Drupal you may be surprised with how much you can accomplish without writing any code, especially if you use the right combination of contributed modules for the task at hand.