I need your opinions (learning Drupal)

If you are not a php coder, then the Pro Drupal Development book is not a good place to start. It is not really written for people who are not confident with php already and the examples only cover individual functions and are not tied together.

You can do a lot with Drupal without module development (it can be hard sometimes to find the correct module to do a specific function because there are so many now) and can build theming by building sub-themes with a knowledge of css, html and only basic php (I actually learnt a lot from the handbook theming guide).

I agree with you that the Drupal site is not that well organised. There is a lot of good information but it can be spread over different sections of the handbook and the forums and, not forgetting, other sites which deal with Drupal - don't limit yourself just to this one. A lot of the Drupal pages are also written by highly knowledgable and experienced developers, but they assume a certain degree of knowledge that beginners may lack. Don't be afraid to add comments to pages to ask questions or post questions on the forums.

I suggest the following ways to learn Drupal:
Build yourself a site - nothing beats hands-on experience. It doesn't matter if it is only on your local PC rather than on a server. If you have an idea then that is good, or try to copy another site's functionality using Drupal. This will get you to use a lot of the main modules (Views, Panels, CCK, etc) and theming. Don't get too attached to the site as you may end up wiping it and starting again when you find how to do things better.

Read some of the forum posts as they come up. This will let you see what others are doing and what solutions are suggested. You may end up knowing some of the answers from things you have read or from similar posts just a few days before and posting your own replies.

Look at some of the (simpler) modules you use. Are then any bugs? Are there any features you would like? If no one else has posted a similar issue on the module, post one yourself. Think how you would solve it and (possibly) write a patch and submit it.

If you need help with anything, don't just rely on Drupal.org. Use google to do a wider search as there are a lot of sites out there with information and many of them explain things a lot better and have videos to follow.

One last thing, I don't think you ever stop learning with Drupal. As soon as you are confident with one version they bring out a new one and you have to learn aspects all over again.

For me one of the biggest learning curves for learning Drupal (and other cms's) was understanding PHP. I already knew (X)HTML, CSS, and some other programming languages. I've found the learning curve pretty steep.

Besides books something that really helped me was the PHP website. Everything is pretty well explained, although sometimes difficult to understand, it usually has extra examples at the bottom, and there are some good tutorials on the web as well. Once you start to understand PHP, Drupal becomes a lot easier to understand as well.

Take a look at the API as well. Although it can be overwhelming at first, it gave me a lot of clues.

For me for example, it took me awhile to understand what:

means (can be compared a little to a paragraph in a piece of text). Once you get those basics, and understand what variables, functions, arguments, if statements, and arrays are, life will get a lot easier.

Don't focus too much on the code examples on drupal.org, I've found too many times that they don't work, but learn to read and write from scratch. Don't depend on modules too much either. People can stop maintaining modules, it can contain bugs, etc. Yes, it's good to help out and fix those, and yes there are excellent modules out there, but when learning Drupal, don't add too many modules at once. Too many things going on then to figure out. Turn on one (core¹/ contributed) module at a time, figure out what it does, what kind of theme output does it create. What are the options for it. It's a beginner's mistake to want to install all kinds of modules, and that may be fine for users, but when you're building a site I've found myself overwhelmed sometimes. Finally a lot of times documentation for modules can be found in the module folder under names such as readme.txt or install.txt.

Also I've learned to do things in Drupal in small steps. Set up a development website instead of working on a main site. Create a few content pieces first, and build your website from there, instead of importing the entire database, only to find out you mangled your development site half way down the line, and having to start all over. Always keep backups, and save your database and files at key points in the development cycle.

It's a bit like learning a strange language. At first you don't understand a word, slowly you start to recognize small 'words' and 'sentences', and before you know you'll be able to speak it.

Hope it helps, and open to feedback. This is how I experienced getting started with Drupal while learning PHP along the way, it's been a rocky road to say the least. But once you understand it a bit, you'll never want to work with anything else, simply because it does it all, or can. And that is one of the things that make open source systems such as Drupal beautiful.

¹ Please note that, at the time of writing, there are some core modules which are needed for the basic operation of the cms, and should not be turned off or uninstalled. These modules are listed seperately on the modules page.

hands down the best tutorials i ever watched:
beginlearningdrupal.com
the person that created it made it for designers