Drupal 5 Views Recipes is an odd book. It had been published almost two years after the last stable version of Views for Drupal 5 (aka Views 1) was released, and more than eight months after the first stable version of Views 2 was released for Drupal 6 (to much fanfare). And yet the book still feels rushed.
Almost everyone I talk to about the book is initially excited about a views book, and then when I tell them that it only focuses on Views 1, they just look puzzled. The author, Marjorie Roswell, addresses this straight on in the preface saying “It’s simple, many web developers still use Drupal 5”. The usage stats on the views module over at http://drupal.org/project/usage/views are pretty interesting. The listed Views 1 usage is actually up a bit from a year ago. Of course, Views 2 use has grown 10-fold in that same time.
That is not the only thing I find odd about the book. The book has 94 recipes in it, but many of them are not actually recipes for creating views. There are recipes for miscellaneous tasks such as posting an issue on drupal.org, or downloading the Admin Menu module, or installing Firebug. All of which are useful things to know, but it is odd seeing them intermingled with the genuine views recipes. Then there are ones like “Recipe 2: Views-related URLs on your site” which isn’t even a how-to, it is just a numbered collection of facts.
On the pro-side, there is a lot of useful information in this book. It really shows off the breath of what is possible with views (I had no idea someone had written a guitar chord formatter for Drupal). The recipes are easy to follow. And you get lots of example of how to use the Views Argument Handling Code field, which can be hard to figure out on your own.
This book is targeted at the administrator level. It does not go into the Views API in any depth, so it is not much help for developers looking to view-enable their modules. And it has you pasting code into blocks, when the best practice would be to create a module.
So, if you are new to Drupal, and have just been told that managing a bunch of old, views-enabled Drupal sites is suddenly going to be part of your job, and the online views doucmentation isn’t cutting it for you, this might be the book for you.
Thanks! This is the first
Thanks! This is the first really useful review I remember reading about this book.
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venkat-rk@drupal.org
Thanks for writing a review
The whole first chapter is designed, in a variety of ways, to expose the full extent of the Views interface. The Firefox/Firebug installation for instance (Recipe 8, three pages), enables Recipe 9, the jQuery command for opening up all the fieldsets at once. Likewise, for Views-related URLS on your site--lots of people won't find that on-site help, without being pointed directly to it.
I sprinkled a few modules in there (one for default views, another for hook_link_alter-ing feeds displayed in panels), but I think many site admins will like the no-host-password-required approach on the blocks.
Re: "Navigating the Online Drupal Community," (how to post on drupal.org, searching the issue queue, how to apply a patch, etc.) I've actually gotten notes from people who've been grateful for the guidance. Drupal.org got a lot smarter about issue queue search just I was was completing the book, BTW. Had to rewrite a few in that chapter when the site upgraded. (Some of the hot tips on how to overcome usability barriers in the issue queue search, thankfully, weren't needed any more.)
I know the timing is off for many potential readers, though I suspect many appropriate readers are still out there who need this book. Thanks very much for writing the review.
- Margie
A note: Many of my favorite recipes are in the "CCK and Views" and "Views Galore" chapters (linking views to related site content, Views Fusion, mapping and proximity search). I wonder if anyone will use the sIFR pie-chart recipe. I used to do that in Access reports (with TrueType fonts), and translated it into Drupal.