WordPress Complete [Format Kindle]

"Complete" in no way describes this book. I have yet to find any mention of tagging, sessions, pages, or many other important aspects of WP. Part of the problem is that the book's index is almost non-existent. In all fairness, the author says that the book is for beginners; that said, the author spends far too much time reiterating the easy stuff (installation, how to create a basic blog entry, etc) that is explained for free on the WP web site (and dare I say in a much clearer way). Also, the figures look like they were printed-on-demand on a laser printer; this is not acceptable for a price tag like this (cf. O'Reilly's production values). I returned it right away.

This book reads more like a hardcopy of a bloggers notes to another blogger on how to install and customize WordPress. It spends more time glossing over descriptions and screenshots of other blog software and discussing the perceived shortcomings of WordPress mu (multi-user) than in discussing how to actually customizing a WordPress installation.

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.

The reason for me to buy this book was for the information on how to develop your own themes. But that information isn't presented well. The coding example starts off relatively easy and well explained, but before long, it doesn't really teach anything as much as it just tells you to plug in chunks of code into your files and then see what happens. And the book changes coding conventions to an abbreviated form somewhere along the way, just when it starts to get a bit complicated for a non-coder like me.

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.

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