Drupal 10 Module Development: Develop and deliver engaging and intuitive enterprise-level apps, 4th Edition

Since the announcement of Drupal 10, ways to ascertain the difference between Drupal 10 and the previous versions have steadfastly increased but, along with this book, a developer can leap ahead of the curve! The book gives clear and thorough insights in module development with examples and hands-on application with projects you can do at your pace. It was a joy to go through and the book will definitely be indispensable in any developer's toolbox.

First of all, a disclaimer: I have been working with Drupal since Drupal 6 and also one of the regular contributors to Drupal 8 and later. I am writing this review based on my reading of a reader copy provided by the publisher. This review is my own opinion.I think this book is a great fit for someone who has moderate programming experience and a basic awareness of Drupal. This might be a little overwhelming if you have no experience with Drupal at all or at least with Symfony style of designing applications. This is because Drupal follows patterns typical to Symfony applications and uses several of the Symfony components. If this is not you, the first chapter does a decent job of explaining Drupal for developers but in my opinion, the latter part of the book can still be quite overwhelming. The book does explain some of the basic design patterns and concepts used in Drupal but does not wait long before jumping into example code that contains all the concepts that were just mentioned.This is not a significant problem as I know a typical Drupal developer’s journey is likely to begin with a lot of site building and community support. Most Drupal developers have entered the community in this fashion. By the time you need this book, you would have already worked enough with Drupal to build a moderately complex site by assembling various contributed modules and even writing a simple custom module or two. That is when you will begin to realize the lack of structured documentation in the official sources (the Drupal community is doing significant work to fix this) and you will go looking for a book such as this.The book is meant to be read in any order you wish. If you haven’t worked with Drupal before, you would probably read the first two chapters and then jump to the chapter you want. There are 18 chapters in all and the order, in my opinion, is highly subjective and feels random. For example, I would prefer chapters on testing, working with files, and security near the beginning rather than at the very end. It is human nature to skip the chapters at the end of the book and we, as an industry, need to get better at security and automated testing. The order doesn’t help that at all. That is the only reason I have taken away a star from this book. The content is detailed and highly relevant to the Drupal 10 era.For example, the chapter on caching began with the basics but the author did not lose any time in explaining the nuances of bubbling up cacheability metadata and how caching affects different scenarios such as redirects or access control. The author then soom jumps to placeholders and lazy building. All this happens in less than 20 pages, a lot of which is code listing. The author similar covers topics ranging from custom entities and custom fields to internationalization, logging, batches, JavaScript, and as I mentioned before, security and automated testing.If you spend time regularly developing Drupal applications, then this is a very useful book to keep as reference and even read to remind yourself of what Drupal provides. It is very easy to forget the powerful features in the Drupal framework and this book fixes that problem.

Excellent book, straight to the point! I gained a good base on Drupal module development through this book. I've even been using some snippets as a starter point for my custom modules, it's definitely helping me progress in my career as a developer.

Daniel Sipos and Packt have given us an updated edition (the 4th now!) of Drupal Module Development. In all its editions, this is THE book about developing modules for Drupal. If you have not read either the Drupal 8 or Drupal 9 edition, and you're looking for some nitty-gritty developer-focused work and explanation, this is for you. This book is for developers and only developers. Not only will you build and build on modules throughout the course of the book, but you also get detailed explanations and instructions about core Drupal concepts and features, with a lot of emphasis on custom entities and plugins (68 pages), data modeling and storage (61 pages), access control (42 pages), working with files and images (40 pages) and automated testing (40 pages). If you've never done any Drupal development before, this is not the book with which to start. The Drupal 10 Cookbook would be a better transition for someone who uses Drupal and wants to get more into the code. If you are a developer, though, this is a great resource for Drupal 10 module development.If you have the Drupal 9 edition, though, you will find this edition is an iterative change. The book's structure is the same, having the same chapters as the previous edition. Without having read every single word of the book, I've noticed that even the chapters themselves contain mostly small changes (tweaks, perhaps) on the 3rd edition. In some way this is to be expected. After all, the Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 transition itself is one not of huge changes, especially on the development front.One thing that is disappointing is how the book fails to use the new edition to make the differences of Drupal 10 more apparent. I kept asking myself, "What has changed between Drupal 9 and Drupal 10?" Yes, I can search for such an answer (or ask Chat GPT) but the developer-specific changes are not well enumerated (if there are any) in most of the official proclamations online about Drupal 10. This would have been a great opportunity to give an overview of how development for Drupal 10 differs (if at all) from Drupal 9. Even if it didn't differ much, saying so would have been worth pointing out.

Buen libro