I've been wanting to read Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves for quite awhile and finally got it off my to read list. I will admit that I've built up the book in my mind and had certain expectations of what I thought it would be. I was hoping for a practical guide to theme construction with tips on how to take a theme to the next level of professionalism. Barring that, I was expecting an introductory guide to building themes with lots of practical examples for how to build a theme with good descriptions of what was being and why.

Unfortunately, the book didn't really deliver for me on either account. To be fair, the book positions itself as "an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6" so some of my primary expectations were unfounded. For my second expectation, the main reason the book failed to delver was a lack of examples and a cursory explanation of the CSS, HTML, and PHP used in the examples. My other big complaint was that the book continually refers to later chapters rather than explaining a topic as it arises.

A significant portion of the book works very well as a reference for building themes. Unfortunately, these chapters do not explain what you should do with the reference material so the reader is left to learn a significant amount of theming on their own.

If you would like to learn how to build themes, I would suggest reading chapters 6-9 first which have more examples and give more of a how to guide. After you have learned the fundamentals, Chapters 1-5 will be more relevant and explain some of the background information you need to thoroughly understand themes.

Overall, I believe this book deserves a place in your library if you want reference material for theming core functionality. However, if you are looking for a book on how to build themes from scratch, you may want to turn elsewhere.