Chapter 5 - Drupal Content
Chapter 5 really tips Drupal's hand in showing just how much custom coding is involved even in content display for themes. It's not overwhelming, but is a bit frustrating as it seems to unnecessarily complicate a process that other systems simplify a great deal. Many will disagree, saying that this is what gives Drupal its edge over other systems, but this can be a good example that will help you decide if you prefer flexibility at the cost of ease of use.
Chapter 6 - Customizing the Content-Editing Forms
Forms are dealt with in a more straightforward fashion. One of the nice features of Drupal is its extensive setup for forms. Managing everything from database content calls to site filtering, Drupal's built-in forms support is one of its clear advantages. This chapter covers a lot of ground efficiently (if a bit lightly at times) in regards to building forms, styling forms, connecting forms and administering them.
Chapter 7 - Users and Community Participation
This chapter very clearly covers the role of users -- both visitors and administrators -- on a Drupal site, and how to both limit and allow access to specific areas. It also goes over some basic tools for spam prevention and general public-generated user content. This is a very nuts and bolts chapter, but one that I think people would do well to pay special attention to, as it can help avoid a lot of problems down the road. It also has some very good suggestions on how fine-tuning user roles and fields can streamline some processes.
Chapter 8 - Administrative Interfaces
This chapter feels more like a "just in case you need it" addition, as I would imagine that specifically tailoring the admin (beyond a few basic access level adjustments) would be pretty far down on the priority list. But regardless, it's a clearly written look at both setting and limiting access points by user and role, to altering the look and arrangement of the admin interface itself.
Chapter 9 - Learning Javascript
A nice addition for the book is this last section of chapters that deals with Javascript and jQuery specifically. It seems apt, since we are currently in the web life cycle where there are almost as many "ajaxy" things going on with a page as not. This chapter is a more heady approach to Javascript as a language. It starts off simply enough by showing the basic structure of the language, but quickly morphs into using it as a programmer, and some common syntax variances between it and other languages. To be honest, it's not going to be necessary (or really even helpful) for most developers to spend too much time here. Read through it quickly for some big-picture basics on the language, and then move on to the following chapters.
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