Taking the plunge - The Drupal Newbie

As a Drupal newbie, one goes through the so called a long and a painful drupal learning phase. The period is long because of various reasons.
Much of it is due to the lack of good study material out there. There are many great ones but they all have their own stars and scary points. It also takes some time to learn the right books to buy and read. Even to have the right questions to seek answers too. Its a maze out there. Drupal documentation is good. But the moment you come to the modules, it falls apart. Some modules are documented properly while others confuse a newbie more than they convince them. It will be nice to have a "documentation complete" milestone before the "module complete" or the check-in milestone before releasing the module to the community.


Having said this, I must also mention that the local Drupal Community is very vibrant and very supportive. Needles to say that it is so much important for you to reach out to your local Drupal users group. Its hard to believe how supportive the local community can be. My learning Drupal actually accelerated after joining the Seattle Users Group and I have met very fine folks too. Needless  to say the immense guidance and free knowledge you get just hearing them talk about Drupal. You can even get some internship or volunteering opportunities in some community projects. This was the best part of being in the community.

For a newbie it is also very important to understand how the Drupal community works. For folks who come from copyright / patent and intellectual property owning organizations, it can be very interesting to learn why people share their knowledge freely and how people earn their money and derive happiness doing it. Its a very selfless world out there. You have to be in the pool to learn swimming, it does not happen the other way. I learned this very late. You have to be in the community to learn Drupal. The sooner you are in the water, the sooner you will learn swimming.

One last word on learning Drupal fast... Just get started... do not worry about the versions you should start with... pick up the latest and do your localhost deployments. And even if the major version release happens, it will be a while it stabilizes and you will have reference material available for it. Stick to your original version and then migrate when ever you feel comfortable. What do you think ???