A few people have asked me what I think of Lullabot’s DrupalizeMe video tutorial series.

I signed up for it about a month ago and the bottom line is at $45 per month ($35 if you sign up for a year), it’s a really good value. I haven’t tried the other for-fee services out there so I don’t really have any basis for comparison. I just know these tutorials have helped me tremendously.

Learning by video is not my favorite way to learn. I would be much happier with written instructions, but I know I’m in the minority on this. I should mention that when I started these tutorials, I already had a pretty good understanding of Drupal basics. Had I come to the videos first, it might have been overwhelming. Then again, there were some things I got stuck on before watching the videos, that I would have breezed through after having watched them.

I’ve watched about 30 hours of video on drupalizeme.com so far, mostly the theming, php and jquery series. I really like the series as they teach you things you might not have known you needed to learn. I had to rewatch the videos many times and follow along with their examples in order for the info to sink in. So it probably took me 300 hours to watch these 30 hours of video!

I feel I’ve gotten a good grasp on the fundamentals through these videos. They also helped me to really see what Drupal is: a bunch of different markup and scripting languages united by a sane naming convention. It’s more than that, of course, but I had never seen the big picture before – it was a revelation.

After watching the videos I was able to write some simple jquery effects scripts, some simple PHP preprocessing functions (to include css and js only on certain pages or to override the look of form submit buttons) and I even created some wacky lesson modules (one that adds a backwards text tab to every node!).

The main thing learning (a little) PHP taught me is that building my first site would have actually been much easier and less time-consuming had I employed it! I mean I really tied myself in knots at times, doing crazy-complex layout maneuvers with CSS and views when I could have accomplished the same thing with a line or two of PHP code in a tpl.php file!

Unfortunately, my learning has slowed down the last couple weeks as I’ve been really pushing to complete the gench site, but I’m looking forward to watching more drupalizeme videos soon. I plan to tackle the videos on Build a Module next.

There are also a number of free Drupal video tutorials on sites like vimeo and youtube. They’ve been helpful as well.