api

This session just went through 20 of the most used APIs in Drupal and described quicly what they can be used for. The presenter has also posted blog posts about some of these APIs in the month leading up to DrupalCon.

One of the DrupalCon presentations that I wanted to be sure to watch early on was Databases: The Next Generation, presented by database maintainer and self described gadfly Larry Garfield.

There have been some big changes in the Database Abstraction layer in Drupal 7, which I've been using in patches to core and porting a contib module or two to D7. I've already groked dynamic queries and why they are great from reading up on PDO, but since most of my database experience has been using Drupal 6, I still haven't quite figured out how transactions work even though they've been around in databases for a long time ....and I have no idea about how to make master/slave work.

Even though, as Garfield says, everything in this presentation is covered in the docs at http://drupal.org/node/310069, this presentation is a great and worthwhile intro to the D7 db abstraction layer.

Through the Lullabot podcasts, Jeff Eaton (and the other Lullabots) gave me my introduction to Drupal. I'm not sure how he packs his Drupal chatter with so much information and hilarity all at the same time, but the combination is definitely one of the things that got me hooked on Drupal. 

So reading quotes from this presentation as they popped up on Twitter is one of the things that made me most angry at the ash cloud. But it is now up online (!) thanks to the amazing DCSF organizers (double !).

Here are my notes. I've removed most of the funny (and got tired at the end), so you should really watch the real thing.