I have not yet finished reading it, but so far it has been a great experience.
Rating: 4 / 5

This book is a major disappointment, even with realistic expectations of fast-to-market quality-be-damned information technology books.

Lets face it, we are willing to pay AND read a book such as this one for two primary reasons:

1. It gives us perspective and insight to make informed choices.

2. It gathers cohesive information together so that we don’t have to.

With a title like ‘building online communities with drupal, phpbb, and wordpress’, one would expect:

1. a loaddown on the merits of drupal, phpbb and wordpress as choices of tools for building an online community

2. instructions on installation, configuration and maintenance of each software package

As for the former, shame on the editor. He certainly did not do his job. I surmise that he couldn’t have done anything more than to hand the same outlines to 3 individuals who have some domain knowledge of the respective software projects and told them to cobble up something. The contents of the book may as well be three disparate booklets hastily bundled together for bulk; there is no cohesion whatsoever. Don’t expect any insight to help you decide what is more appropriate for your own situation. Well, to be fair, he did mention that topic a little, feebly, in the backcover. That’s about all you should expect to get out of this book; in the backcover. Well then, what is the justification for buying and reading the book?

As for the latter, the writing is poor in general. I struggled through most of the book. In the end, I gained no more knowledge of these software packages than before reading the book. In fact, I would have been better off to wade through the online documentation that the respective programs provide. On a relative scale, the sections on drupal and phpbb are equally bad; the section on wordpress is better.

Bottom line: save your money and avoid the frustration.
Rating: 1 / 5

What a confusing disaster. It rehashes the online instructions so you are wasting your money and even worse, they don’t complete their thoughts in the book.

The installation instrucions for drupal was a joke…use the online installation…same thing.

Help with phpbb…again can get better help online.

WordPress … maybe, just maybe ok since I’m not a WordPress user.

If you are looking for a book to take you beyond what is online, this is not the book. They simply put a cover on what you can find online so they could make some bucks. If you are a beginner to installing any type of php program, you will pull your hair out in frustration and if you don’t have hair, you may grow it from the stress in trying to understand this rehash that was poorly organized and written.

I have bought hundreds of computer books and this by far is one of the worse.
Rating: 1 / 5

I know what the problem is here since I work closely with Drupal. The book was released before the actual program was. The book was written for Drupal 4.7 which is in beta at the moment. Since 4.7 is still in test mode for bugs, the book should of never been released until 4.7 was final or the book should of been written for 4.6 with an excerpt for 4.7.

I do suspect those who gave this book a good rating are not sincere. I don’t know how they could be since 4.7 has already made changes and updates that is not in the book. I apologize to those readers who are mislead by Drupal team members who are more interested in sales then reporting accurate information. For this deception, I gave the book a low rating. What may make the book even more troublesome is when 4.7 is finally released, the book may even have more mistakes then it does now.

Drupal is a good program. The author of this book and his greed to put out a book to make money bassed on Drupal’s popularity is something I do not condone.
Rating: 1 / 5

Terrible book. Anyone who gave this a good review had to be family of the author. I only got to page 20 of the first chapter (drupal) and tons of mistakes. It will give you directions to click a box or do something and it does not exist. This book didn’t make life easier but harder. If you buy this book it it is a waste of money. For the first 20 pages, I spent half my time at drupal site trying to find the features that was misplaced in the book. You are better off using the site documentation. This book truly was one of the worse buys I ever made at Amazon.
Rating: 1 / 5