In the preface to Front End Drupal, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert gives a candid analysis of one of the main challenges facing the Drupal project: the lack of designers to help make Drupal sites more visually appealing. Drupal has a stigma of being a platform geared towards programmers, which often sets it at odds with the skillsets familiar to most designers and general web developers. Part of that perception is unwarranted, but part of it is not.
To help fill in the knowledge gap between what Drupal can do and how to actually do it, Front End Drupal steps in with a more specialised focus on just the user-facing aesthetics and functionality of a site. Through its eleven chapters, it covers topics from best practices when planning the layout and functions of a site, on through theming, custom forms, site administration, and even has separate sections on javascript and jquery implementation. However, to properly evaluate how the book tackles these subjects, it's important to first take a look at Drupal itself, and also to consider the intended and/or ideal audience for this book.
Drupal is one of -- if not the -- most robust web development platforms around, offering a seemingly limitless set of customization options and pre-built modules to help developers realize, more or less, any of the demands they might face while building a site. But that power comes at a price - one of accessibility. One of the answers to Buytaert's admission in the preface is that there is an underlying base level of skill sets needed to adequately maneuver your way through the different tasks you'll need to accomplish in the course of even a modest custom-designed website.
For most content management system (CMS) platforms, there is an implied level of competency with XHTML and CSS required for entry. You're not going to get very far without those, but after that you pretty much have your pick of several very nice systems. Javascript is less of an issue, because with the many different libraries out there (jQuery -- which is used in Drupal and discussed in the book -- being one of the most popular) it's relatively easy to get up and running with easy scripts and nice effects by even the novice designer. The last remaining component is PHP, which is where Drupal unfortunately distinguishes itself greatly.
Its reputation as being a programmer's platform is entirely earned by the level of code it requires of the user to achieve basic functions with development, and even with just theming. Most other CMS options will allow PHP for custom page functions or uses, but generally try to separate that from the developer unless they really need to alter how the system or a component fundamentally works. And PHP is a decidedly different skillset from the main focus of a "designer", which is something I really wish that the book would emphasize more. In short, if you're not comfortable with PHP, then Drupal probably is not a good development option for you. Which leaves the main audience for a book like Front End Drupal to be jack-of-all-trades developers, or more code-junkey programmers who might be receiving design layouts from an actual designer.
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