The book started off with an introduction to WordPress, showed how to install it and set things up, and soon even walked me through making a custom “theme” from scratch that while primitive, is perfectly functional as a usable blog. If nothing else, all this helped me to understand that preconceptions aside, WordPress is not all that difficult to administer.

Starting from zero knowledge of WordPress, between the core knowledge that this book gave me, and a few quick web searches to solve specific problems I bumped into, I successfully got my very own installation of WordPress running on my OS X desktop machine. (Comes with an Apache web server as standard equipment, dont’cha know!) I wanted a sandbox to play and mess around with for a while before moving out into the real world on a real server — normally that wouldn’t be necessary if you have a webhost somewhere. This entailed such additional complexities (not covered in this book) as installing the mySQL database that WordPress relies upon (i.e. follow instructions on a web page), and activating the PHP scripting language that WordPress uses (installed in OS X, but deactivated by default). Not being a “command-line” kind of person, it was actually a fair bit easier than I’d have anticipated, but I never would have dared poke around with such things without the toehold of core WordPress knowledge that I got from this book.

There are a handful of minor English problems in the book, like there should be an “a” here, and a “the” there (and “iTune” should have an “s” at the end, spellcheck kind of stuff), but the explanations are nevertheless completely clear, so not even a full star off for that.

A second half-star off for the tendency to occasionally leap into rather frightening PHP code listings, that lack sufficient comments within the code to make them easily comprehensible to beginners. A bit more hand-holding here would have been appreciated. That said, although I’ve never touched PHP before, by actually taking the time to walk through the code shown (not understanding everything), I nevertheless soon had a pretty solid feel for what made things tick in WordPress. And the beginnings of the confidence that comes with actually knowing a little bit about what happens “under the hood.”

…which is what I wanted this book for.
Rating: 4 / 5

I understand the author is from Bangladesh, but didn’t this publishing house have an editor on staff? How did a $40 book make it to the bookshelves of highly respected bookstores with writing that reads like a term paper from junior high?

Normally I wouldn’t bother to come to Amazon and criticize a book that was generally helpful, but I just can’t understand how this kind of writing managed to find its way into book form. This is why editors exist.
Rating: 2 / 5

The rest of the book is all filler. Did you know that blog mean Web-Log? And that a person who blogs is a blogger? Well, if you didn’t, then the book might be worth its high price tag. But I just told you, so now you do.

I’m just grumpy because I lost my receipt and can’t return it now (bought mine offline).

Want to Develop your own wordpress theme?

Urban Giraffe’s article, tho old, has way better and more relevant information than this book. And it’s free.

[...]

Rating: 2 / 5

The screenshots often are on different pages than the text they go with, and most examples where the user might include more than a line or two of text simply copy and paste a single line over and over, usually extolling the virtues of the book’s publisher (which joins several others on my list to avoid in the future.)

Several pages are spent covering how to use several FTP clients, yet none is spent on the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), one of the core needs for any meaningful customization of a WordPress site.

Very little of the WordPress API is discussed.

The author “explains” creating your own “widget” with very little description of what they are, and virtually none of why you would do so. He then follows with a sample of a “plug-in”, yet a widget is in fact a specialized plug-in, so why are they presented in the reverse order? Very little is also done in terms of explaining how to customize a theme to allow the use of widgets, outside of providing a complete sidebar code page without showing which line(s) of code are the actual widget-enabling ones.

I realize that this is not a book about CSS or PHP, but neither is it a book about ftp software, which is after all a lot easier to use, yet more time is spent on how to use FTP than is spent on how to customize an existing theme.

Appears to be the better of the two books currently on the market that detail installing WordPress, but far from complete. Definitely needs a better editing job at the least. Certainly not worth $39.99.
Rating: 3 / 5