Drupal for Education and E-Learning review

It is important for Drupal developers nowdays to create a user friendly system. So you don’t have to be surprised when you find a book about Drupal for teachers and admins who don’t know anything about code writing. This book is Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald.

Bill is well known as the developer of the DrupalEd disrto, but he had also been a teacher for 16 years. So he knows how to teach. He repeats the most important things several times and always shows a short method of accomplishing the task as well as a detailed one.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning is written in a cookbook style, you learn step by step how to build a modern, feature rich education / e-learning site from scratch. It is also important, that you learn how to manage your work in the Drupal way!

The book is well organized. Basic concepts about Drupal are followed by clear instructions to get your Drupal website set up. After laying the foundation a lot of tasks come, for example blogging for teacher and students, creating and handing in assignments, publishing images, podcast and video, creating learning groups, setting up user access and so on.

The author introduces a large part of Drupal core and a well selected set of contributed modules, including CCK, Views (which are used in the whole book), Organic Groups, Content Profile, Coherent Access, DB Maintenance etc. However I missed Quiz which should also be included when we talk about an e-learning site and I think core Book module could also be useful.

You find more information and you can order the book at the website of the publisher, Packt. It is not mentioned by the author, but you can find an URL to a (still incomplete) demo site in some of the pictures of the book. Look at it at www.alphabetademo.com/drupal6. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to build a (learning) website but doesn’t know anything or too much about CMSs or preferably Drupal.