Good Drupal theming and skinning is hard. Really hard. Why? Often, the hard work of making a site smooth for visitors and managers is punted onto a designer who's used to working with pure HTML and CSS. In a system as flexible as Drupal, though, that's only one piece of the puzzle.

Front End Drupal is a book the Drupal world has needed for years, and its arrival is an indication of the software and the community's maturing. Rather than focusing exclusively on 'theming' (the process of skinning and customizing Drupal's HTML output), it covers an impressive range of topics needed to build the user-facing portions of a site.

Converting an existing Joomla! or Wordpress design to Drupal? There's an awesome 'cheat sheet' to help translate. Using jQuery in Drupal? Three chapters cover learning and using the library. Planning your site's structure? Covered. Building an administrative dashboard for editors? A full treatment of that topic alone could fill an entire book, but Front End Drupal gives readers a great overview and points them in the direction of useful tools that can get a lot of the work done for them. It even provides guidance for "front end" folks who need to dig into code to tweak tangly Drupal content like input forms.

The breadth of the book means that individual topics aren't always covered in depth -- if you need to start cranking out serious Drupal code or translating complex designs into HTML, for example, you'll need to dig deeper with other references. Most people making their way through these challenges, though, need a guide to the pieces and how they fit together before they can absorb the details.

For far too long, there's been no single place where these different disciplines -- the "Front end" part of building a Drupal site -- were treated as parts of a cohesive whole. With the release of Emma and Konstantin's book, that's changed: it's exactly what Front End Drupal provides.