Learning and keeping up with Drupal

Drupal Basics

• Drupal User Guide for people with minimal knowledge of Drupal
• Understanding Drupal and Planning your site from the folks at drupalize.me
• Drupal Site Builder Certification Learning Plan from Acquia Academy

Drupal Reference Materials

• Top level link to Essential background concepts, OOP conventions etc at the Drupal API Reference on drupal.org

Essential background concepts

Here are some high level overviews of Drupal concepts:

• Object-oriented conventions used in Drupal
• Extending and altering Drupal
• Security and best practices
• Types of information in Drupal

High level User Interface concepts

• Menu entries, local tasks, and other links
• Routing API and page controllers
• Forms
• Blocks
• Ajax

Storing and retrieving data

• Entities
• Fields
• Configuration API
• State API
• Views
• Database abstraction layer

Other Essential APIs

• Plugins
• Services and the Dependency Injection Container
• Events
• Internationalization
• Caching
• Utility classes and functions
• User accounts, permissions, and roles
• Render API
• Theme system
• Update API
• Migration

Additional topics

• Batch API
• Queue API
• Typed Data
• Automated tests
• PHP Runtime Assert Statements
• Integrating third-party applications
• Drupal API longer references with more details

Free videos

• Saranya Ashokkumar is a prolific youtube content creator. Check out some nice short form videos on how to use various modules, create modules etc. https://www.youtube.com/@d4drupal324/featured

Blogs and articles

• Drupal Official Blog - News and stories to help you make something amazing, for anyone, with Drupal.
• Phil Norton of #!code writes some amazing articles and has useful code snippets.
• Martin Anderson-Clutz's sandbox for a wide variety of fantastic Drupal, Acquia and module information at. He is also the author and maintainer of the Smart Date Module and about 8 bazillion other modules.
• Matt Glaman posts regularly about fascinating aspects of Drupal (and is the author of existing and upcoming Drupal books). Keep up with him here.
• Salsa Digital Agency has some good articles that are worth keeping up with.
• Dries Buytaert's blog - Dries is the founder and project lead of Drupal and the CTO of Acquia.

Pay videos

• drupalize.me is an amazing training facility spun off from Lullabot which provides on-demand training and articles on all things Drupal. This is definitely worth a subscription if you want to fully grasp Drupal development or bring new people up to speed.
• Symfonycasts is another incredibly good service that teaches all about the nuts and bolts of Symfony, PHPUnit and many other tools. I think the Drupal course they have might be a little dated now.

Drupal Training

• Mike Anello of Drupal Easy has excellent training courses worth checking out. These include: Drupal Career Online and Professional Module Development. Mike also offers project coaching and consulting.

Keep up with Drupal news

Everything used to happen on IRC, but now most of that is now on Slack.

Other great sources of news are:

• Planet drupal

• The Weekly Drop, a Drupal newsletter The Drupal Association has partnered with TheWeeklyDrop to bring up to date News and Events to the Drupal community. You can sign up for a free subscription.

• TheDropTimes is a news website started with the vision of contributing to the growth of a vibrant community of users and contributors around Drupal through the process of covering and promoting everything happening around Drupal.

• DrupalSun Feed of Drupal related articles from all over the web.

• Mastodon is starting to show signs of Drupal life with a Mastodon instance focused on Drupal.

• Twitter is a complete cesspool of misinformation, but still has many useful Drupal posts from various sources.

Drupal Podcasts

• Talking Drupal is a long standing weekly conversation about and around Drupal development. It was started by Stephen Cross, John Picozzi, and Nic Lafin in 2013 and is still going strong. This author was interviewed on Episode #398
• Lullabot Podcast: News, interviews, and tips about Drupal and Open Source from the team at Lullabot
• Mike Anello's Drupal Easy podcast

Books

There are many books about Drupal that are worth checking out.

• Daniel Sipos's Drupal 10 Module Development: Develop and deliver engaging and intuitive enterprise-level apps, 4th Edition published April 2023
• Adam Bergstein's Drupal 10 Masterclass: Build responsive Drupal applications to deliver custom and extensible digital experiences to users published Jan 2024
• Matt Glaman and Kevin Quillen's Drupal 10 Development Cookbook. Published in Feb 2023
• Luca Lussos's Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development: Build fast, responsive Drupal websites with custom theme design to deliver a rich user experience published August 2023. For an interview with the author about this book check out this episode of Talking Drupal
• 31 days of Drupal migrations by Mauricio Dinarte updated October 2020
• Fran Gil's Expert in Drupal 9 Front-End Development. Updated in Sep 2022
• Fran Gil's Expert in Drupal 9 Back-End Development. Updated in Sep 2022
• Decoupled Drupal in Practice by Preston So Jan 2019
• Drupal 8 Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Drupal 8 updated for 2019
• Drupal 8 module development. Learn how to write Drupal 8 modules by Lakshmi Narasimhan - last updated in 2017
• Check out more older Drupal books from Packt publishing
• Drupal Book.org is an online only book by Ivan. Updated Sep 2018. While it is not complete, it is a nicely formatted valuable resource
• Drupal 8 Theming with Twig by Chaz Chumley Published in March 2016

Please note

Some of these are affiliate links so Amazon may send me some money if you purchase items using these links.