As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyyk's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.

While it has been close to a year since this book was published (about just as long since Drupal 7 was released), I marvel how relevant Pro Drupal 7 Development remains as a valuable resource to me. This book and its previous versions have saved my hide so many times that I have lost count. This book may have been sitting on my desk for a year but I assure you it hasn't been collecting dust.

If you're going to get any Drupal book in print this is the book you should get if you're going to do any development with Drupal or simply need to troubleshoot your way out of a Drupal related problem. I realize there are a lot of resources available online from the Drupal community that contains much of the same material found in this book. However, this book organizes the material in such a thoughtful manner that I find the looking up material via the book more efficient than seeing it out though online search.

At this moment, I have a tall stack of unread books related to content management systems sitting in front me. Publishers and authors apparently like my review style because new books continue to be sent my way. However, reading a book from cover to cover for a review (the last one being six months ago) takes time and I just haven't been able to keep up with the required reading. So with admission that I haven't read every page of these books, I've decided to at least start posting mini-reviews of select books and hoping that this move is still a win-win-win for publishers, authors and readers.

So in Oprah style, welcome to CMS Report's Book Club. The first book of this new series is Bob Ray's MODX: The Official Guide. This is the first book published by MODX Press and represents how much the MODX community recognizes the need to get quality CMS books about their projects into the hands of developers and users. I've had a couple conversations with MODX's Jay Gilmore and have witnessed the huge effort and level of support taking place to get this book published.

Becoming a publisher is no easy task but we felt no-one else was going to do it as well as we will at this stage. We have at least 3 other books including one that is nearly complete in the works for release over the next 3 quarters from MODX Press. The first one is the hardest. [Gilmore]