In short, Drupal 6 Site Blueprints is a Drupal book for beginners and not a bad one at that. It uses application, excersises and repetition to teach the reader how to use Drupal in several different contexts. Anything from a personal blog to a multimedia events based site with multiple accounts. It also uses a small range of contributed modules from the Drupal community including CCK and Views, two very important modules and it also includes an appendix which shows a user how to get a Drupal website going on there own computer, everything including apache and MySQL (too bad it's not PostgreSQL ;p ).

There is one thing that I can't help but think though. I think this book gets too advanced for its own good. It shows some one who barely knows how to build a Drupal site based on config alone hwo to do things like build an e-commerce site. While Drupal is diverse enough that you can build sites without needing to code, I'm not sold on the idea of letting Joe Bloggs build a he doesn't really understand the implications of. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I kinda feel that the 'Do it yourself' approach to building a site should have its limitations for your own good and leave the rest to the Pros.

While I am suprised at how much can be accomplished without writting PHP for a Drupal website. I still haven't build a drupal site yet with out writting PHP somewhere or a custom module - mainly to client specific configuration or theming reasons.

The other gotcha about this book is the same gotcha that gets all tech how-to books - they become outdated to quickly. Now Drupal 6 is still the version of choice untill Drupal 7 comes out, and even still Drupal 7 won't really be usable for application building until maybe 4 releases after the initial 7.0 release. That being said - Even though this book is written for Drupal 6, it feels outdated. Like, who uses taxonomy menu? The chapter used modules I'd never hurd of before - now thats not to say they are crap but a good rule of thumb would be, if you can't build it with Acquia Drupal then you need a developer.

So conclusion, if you're a Drupal newbie, you can't code to save yourself, your don't want to spend money on a developer, you're quite a DIY savvy kind of person. This book will help you. But its not essential. For everything else, there is drupal.org and #drupal on irc.freenode.net.