About the Book

Dependency injection, Namespaces, Plugins. Drupal 8 has got all of it. Fortunately, it is more developer friendly than before, but unfortunately, it raises the bar. How do you know when to create a service? How to port your module to Drupal 8? Should you write this piece of code as a plugin? Surely, you can find answers by googling. Drupal has excellent documentation. The hard part is, you will end up spending a lot of time finding out how to do things the "Drupal 8" way, and little time writing code.This book is aimed at cutting that time. Most of the content is the notes I took while porting modules to Drupal 8 and studying the code of already ported modules.

Drupal 8 is a moving target. I keep updating the book and the code as frequently as I can to keep it working with the latest release. If you find anything inconsistent, let me know and I'll update it. You have been warned, this is a WIP book.

The target audience is Drupal module developers. It should be OK even if you are entirely new to Drupal but have PHP experience.

I'd be glad if you give me any feedback, point out any mistakes etc. The fastest way to reach me is via my twitter handle(@lakshminp). I'll give due credits once the book is complete.

FAQ

When is the book expected to be completed?

I plan to add new chapters in future, but a major chunk of the book will be completed by July 2017,

Is there a plan to have a print version?

None as of now. If there is a demand, I'll put up dead tree editions for sale.

Can I start using Drupal 8 now?

Damn yes. At the time I was contemplating about writing this book(July 2015), we were just 12 critical issues away from a beta release. Start learning Drupal 8 today, your future self will thank you.

Will this book help me in porting my Drupal 7 module to Drupal 8?

Sure as hell. Once you know your way around Drupal 8(which I assume this book will help you with) and have a good idea of how your module works, you're all set to port.

I'm new to Drupal development. Can I start with this book?

Yes. It should be digestible. You should know PHP and a thing or two about web frameworks though. I'd recommend Mastering Object Oriented PHP and PHP the "right" way as companion books if you are new to OO PHP and modern PHP programming practices respectively.

Hey, where is the code accompanying this book?

Its here. Feel free to fork it.

I found out a bug in your code/book.

Tweet or mail me about it, I'll get it fixed and give you due credits.

Your code is not working.

Thanks for spotting it. My apologies. I've written my code and tested it with Drupal 8 beta-6. Make sure you're running that version. The APIs keep changing. I periodically update the code to work with the latest beta release.

About the Author

Lakshmi Narasimhan

@lakshminp

Hi! I'm Lakshmi Narasimhan. I'm a full stack web developer with some systems engineering background from my previous incarnation. I mostly work with Drupal nowadays, though I defect to other frameworks like Django. I like to occasionally tinker with Javascript, CSS and play around with different stuff, like devops and functional programming languages.