Book Review: Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery

I have just finished reading Matt Butcher’s latest book, Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery, published by Packt Publishing - ISBN 978-1-847196-16-3. It is a good read. It is one of those books that arrived at the right time and left me inspired.

I have always leaned towards Yahoo’s YUI toolkit when I need an Ajax framework, while the rest of the time I just bash out a bit of JS to get the job done. The more I use Drupal, the more I have been wanting to find time to get into jQuery. This book has got me motivated to play with jQuery - especially in combination with Drupal.

The book is logically structured and flows well from chapter to chapter. I find Matt’s writing style easy to read, he even brought a smile to my face a few times. Matt assumes a basic knowledge of JS and Drupal, but he also provides links so the reader is able to get additional information if their knowledge is lacking. However, a couple of times Matt seemed to switch quite abruptly from assuming a good level of knowledge on a particular topic to explaining what seemed to me to be basic or simple concepts in great detail.

In the first chapter, entitled Drupal and JavaScript, Matt covers the basics of Drupal, its relationship with JavaScript and recommends some essential items for any serious Drupal developer’s toolbox. This chapter provides a nice introduction of what is to come in the rest of the book and allows the reader to become acquainted with Matt’s style.

Working with JavaScript in Drupal covers the basics of the Drupal coding standards and why sticking to the standard is important. It then moves onto a quick overview of Drupal’s theme engine, PHPTemplate, and integrating JS with Drupal themes. I felt that the development practices part of this chapter could have been expanded a bit more and turned into its own chapter. Understanding the basics of theming is critical for being able to follow the rest of the book, but again I think this half of the chapter could have been developed into a separate chapter. Regardless of how the chapter was arranged, the content is well written and provides solid and practical examples.

In jQuery: Do More with Drupal, Matt gives a detailed overview of jQuery and how it is used in Drupal. Although the code sample has limited real world usefulness, it provides the reader with a very clear idea of the power of jQuery and how easy it is to use with Drupal. By the end of this chapter I was left feeling like I wanted to get my hands dirty with jQuery, unfortunately it was after 1am and I had to work the next day.

In Chapter 4, we move onto Drupal’s Behaviors, which is covered in great detail. Behaviors are a key part of Drupal’s JS implementation and essentially provide an events based hooks system in JavaScript. Once again Matt spends a lot of time explaining this feature, how it works, how to use it and where to learn more. Matt’s description of this feature had me thinking “OMG, Drupal behaviours are awesome” throughout the chapter.

Lost in Translations, is the name of a good movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, which I enjoyed watching a few years ago, oh and is also the fifth chapter of the book. I suspect that I am like many English speaking Drupal developers in that I use the basics of the Drupal translation engine, but pay very little attention to how it works as my target audience is English speaking like me. Not only does Matt explain how Drupal’s translation system works in both PHP and JavaScript, he makes it clear why all Drupal developers should understand and use the system - regardless of their native/target language/s.

The JavaScript Themeing chapter was a bit of a surprise for me. I was expecting Drupal to have a JS equivalent to PHPTemplate and for this chapter to outline it and provide some code samples. Instead I learn that Drupal has a very simple, and easy to use, JS themeing system. Matt spends some time discussing best practice for themeing content in JS and goes on to provide the code for his own simple yet powerful jQuery based themeing engine for Drupal.

In AJAX and Drupal Web Services, we learn about JSON, XML and XHR in the context of Drupal. Once again Matt demonstrates the ease of using Drupal and jQuery for quickly building powerful functionality.

Chapter 8 is entitled, Building a Module, and covers the basics of building a JS enabled module for Drupal. Matt also discusses when JS belongs in a theme and when it should be part of a module. The cross promotion of his other book Learning Drupal 6 Module Development ramps up a couple of notches in this chapter. I found the plugs a bit irritating (especially as I own a copy of the book), but overall the chapter is loaded with useful information.

The final chapter, Integrating and Extending, leaves the reader with a solid understanding of what can be done to make jQuery even more useful. This chapter provides a nice motivational finish to the book.

At the start of each chapter Matt recaps what has been covered and outlines where the chapter is heading which makes it easy to get back into the book after putting it down for a few days.

This book is definitely not for the copy and paste coder, nor the developer who just wants ready made solutions they can quickly hack into an existing project. Some may disagree, but I think this is a real positive of this book. Matt uses the examples to illustrate certain concepts or features which he wants the reader to understand. I found the examples got me thinking about what I wanted to use JS and jQuery for in my Drupal sites. Although some of the code samples run to several pages, Matt then spends a lot of time explaining what is happening in bit sized chunks, which makes it easy to understand. I also appreciated the links to documentation so I could get the information I’d need to write my own code for my projects.

One thing which always annoys me about Packt books is the glossy ink they use. In some lighting conditions it is too shiny, which makes it annoying to read, especially with a bed side lamp. On the positive side, the paper is solid and easy to turn.

Sprinkled through the book is some cross promotion of other Packt titles, which I have no issue with, it is a good opportunity to try to grab some additional sales. In a couple of the later chapters it becomes a bit too much. I think once or twice per chapter is reasonable.

I really enjoyed reading Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery, it is easy to read and the chapters are a size which lend themselves to being read in a session. I think any Drupal developer who wants to get into using JS in their sites/projects would benefit from reading this book. I finished it feeling like I wanted to start doing some hacking. I plan to update this site in the next few months, and now jQuery enabled effects is on the requirements list. I hope I can bump into Matt Butcher at a DrupalCon or somewhere else in my travels so I can buy him a beer to thank him for putting together a quality book.

Disclaimer Packt Publishing gave me a dead tree copy of this book to review it and keep. I’m glad they gave me a good title to review.