I should definitely write up this review since half of the screencasts I have done include some module that Aaron Winborn wrote.

Drupal Multimedia, available from Packt Publishing, is a great roadmap for Drupal users getting to know the multimedia terrain. As the author describes in this book, support for images, audio and video is not provided in the core release of Drupal 6 and the multimedia contributed module landscape is still pretty rocky. In spite of this fact, or simply because of it, the author has done an excellent job in presenting some of the best multimedia methods available to Drupal site developers.

Aaron Winborn is an expert and his contributions to the Drupal project are testaments to his knowledge and skill. He has written or contributed to many of the Drupal modules presented in this book and his experience with those methods is very clearly displayed. His biography section points out his experience teaching youth in classrooms and this shows through in the writing. I think many people will appreciate his presentation and style of teaching.

He covers methods for implementing image, audio and video presentation on Drupal sites in a couple of chapters.

Here is what I appreciate most:

1. The book starts with an overview of the basic building blocks of Drupal. Readers of different levels are brought up to the same page before diving into the multimedia lessons.
2. Chapters build on knowledge acquired from previous chapters. Readers can wrap their heads around a system for handling images, for example, and then apply what they learned audio and video.
3. The author uses practical examples in each of the lessons made up of plausible scenarios and then outlines the shortest paths to the solutions. It's easy to identify with the lessons and visualize implementing them in the real world.
4. Highly technical material, such as writing custom functions and themes, are reserved for the later end of the chapters. Readers don't get bogged down with pages of example code until they have grasped the principles.
5. The modules he has chosen to represent the Drupal multimedia realm are among the strongest and most widely used solutions on the market. Readers will gain knowledge and vocabulary in methods that lots of other professionals are already using.

The only caution I might add here is that this certainly isn't a book for brand new Drupal users who don't come with some prior experience. The introductory chapters on the node system and content types only scrape the surface. To make the best use of the book's lessons, readers would be well advised to have some prior experience with Drupal's basics. If you haven't worked directly with the software yet, a good preread is "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6", also published by Packt Publishing.

I really think the writing of this book also helps to shape the future of multimedia development in Drupal. Like a lot of open source projects, contributions from the community help build consensus while leadership and documentation like this book count doubly. These simple lessons describe not only how to use some great modules but also lay out a highly prevalent approach to multimedia development that is soon to become the standard.

Purchasing this and other Drupal books through the link below will give back some small amount of your purchase to the Drupal Association, a non-profit caretaker of the Drupal project: http://drupal.org/books