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I'm looking for recommendations on good books or tutorials for a Drupal newbie.

I write code, mainly in C, for Linux but have only set up rudimentary web sites for sharing my documents with people at work. I'd like to set up a community website for the neighborhood where I live and Drupal looks like it would be useful for this.

I'd appreciate comments and suggestions.

Thanks.

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Drupal is pretty nice to work with, and I regularly use it as a "starter website" for clients and colleagues.

The only downside is there is "too much" available -- with different Content Types (Blog Pages, Stories, static Pages, Polls, etc.), as well as a feature-rich access control scheme.

You can start out with the default Permissions, and create content as static Pages. Just that alone will yield a decent Content-Managed website in a matter of minutes. From there, you can explore third-party themes to change the look-and-feel, as well as third-party modules to add more functionality -- such as UberCart for doing eCommerce shopping carts.

Chances are, you'll spend more time tweaking a third-party theme to get the Look and Feel you want, more than anything else done in Drupal.

If you are running a Fedora, RedHat, or CentOS system, you might want to install the Drupal RPM, set up a blank MySQL database, and configure Apache to serve up the Drupal site. Otherwise, there are several low-cost Drupal hosts available that handle all the low-level legwork for you.

There is a Drupal 6 book in the works, and I've heard some good things about that effort. Though, unless you're planning on tweaking PHP under the hood, or doing something complex, I don't think you'll need a book or tutorial -- especially if you use a Drupal hosting provider.

And of course, you can always ask questions on this Group. :-)
In addition to some of the pointers that Laurence mentioned,smashing magazine's Drupal Developer's toolbox is a pretty good resource for everything related to Drupal. In the end though, drupal.org has some really good tutorials and guides on how to work Drupal.

Books- Pro Drupal Development is a very good book but it is really hardcore and you probably don't want to pick it up unless you plan to build your own modules or customize Drupal.

Videos- http://www.lullabot.com/ has a video about Drupal. I haven't seen it but if you are an audio learner (? someone who learns by listening) you might want to try their video and their podcasts.
Hi John,

Try the Dojo at http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo lots of screen casts to get you going, all done by volunteers.
Also, http://drupal.org/planet this is an aggregate of Drupal related rss feeds accross the world, case studies and step by step instructions on creating modules/snippetts, and sites are available. Drupal.org is undergoing a site redesign and its all documented there.

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