This book is definitely money well spent. I have been using Drupal since 2007, starting with Drupal 5 and have quite a variety of sites under my belt. With that said, This book provides a lot of information about "Tried and True" modules. This is definitely a timesaver as I can attest to. I've spent countless hours trying out different modules over the years until finally settling on one that is stable and works. This is a must for anyone starting out with Drupal.

As an Advanced User, I skimmed a lot of sections as I was curious whether the author's and I would see eye-to-ey on a lot of things and surprisingly, we did. There are a lot of examples throughout that a beginner and even the more advanced user can use to get good hands on experience with blocks, themes, modules, taxonomy, CCK, Views, and much much more.

I spent most of my time on CCK, Views and Ubercart, as these are areas that I needed to learn more about. Now, after just a couple of days, I can say I have a solid Catalog foundation created and ready to fill with products for one or my customers. I plan to use what I've learned to automate the membership process as well once things die down (shh, don't tell Joe, I want it to be a surprise). With what I've learned about CCK, I can now bridge the gap of using various image upload modules and just use IMCE throught the whole site, thus remaining consistent and improving the "User Experience". One of the "Best Practices" that I'll definitely be using that I picked up is with Views. When creating a new view, it's best to reference the content and not the direct node. This reduces the number of SELECT statements that must be called, thus improving the performance of that view.

I have by all means only covered a small subset of features. If you're still not sure whether this is the book for you, you can always thumb through a bit of it at Amazon.com.