Jerry Saperstein said
If you are just starting out with WordPress, then the best book I've found for that is Lisa Sabin Wilson's "WordPress For Dummies" (WPD). WPD will carry you surprisingly far into the installation, use, maintenance and extension of WordPress. It is now in its second edition with a third expected soon.
For most people, WPD will suffice.
But If your needs are more demanding, then Aaron Brazell's "WordPress Bible" is a good place to go.
Brazell gets much deeper under the WordPress hood than Sabin-Wilson. - and this content is not for the neophyte.
The content is eclectic, with a lot of emphasis on building plugins. Installing WordPress is covered, but not in the same supportive way you'll find in WPD. Some chapters are head-scratchers: why are nine pages devoted to the WordPress help system ("Codex") and other support groups? Chapters like "Extending WordPress with Plugins", "Widgetizing WordPress", "Understanding the WordPress Database Class" and the doozy "Dissecting the Loop and WP_Query" give you what you need to know to write and manage plugns. Another chapter talks about using WordPress as a Content Management System, which I found helpful, and wish was three times longer.
Overall, "WordPress Bible" is a valuable addition to any serious WordPress library. My one criticism of the book is about Wiley, the publisher: they have a adopted a design that makes it look as if the type is printed in gray, which I find very difficult to read for more than a few minutes at a time. Wiley does not respond to customer comments. Because of this flaw, I will buy Wiley books only when they appear to be best in class.
Jerry
Manny A. Gongora said
This is the perfect companion to your keyboard and mouse as you dive into Wordpress to not only write blog posts, but create plugins, create themes, work with functions, create widgets and more. This is very easy to read, it's updated up to 2.9 version and nothing will be different when 3.0 comes out as it does cover other things like Wordpress MU and buddypress. I love this book and was looking forward to it so bad, I drove across the state to pick up the only copy left in NJ. Congrats to Aaron on a great piece of work and I am glad i heard of it on the wptavern podcast.
E. A. Shahzade said
The internet is an amazing source of information.
The content; tutorials, examples, narratives for virtually everything
provides an amazing level of opportunity to be informed.
For those of us who remember the pre-wired world of beloved but dusty,
stale libraries, the web of information is literally epic.
But increasingly, there's too much information on popular subjects.
There's spam, thin content, mistakes, incoherent reviews.
And there are many excellent posts, ebooks, videos, etc.
Interspersed throughout even the valuable resources,
there's a lot of unreliable, unstructured info.
With WordPress Bible, Aaron has given us back
our most precious commodity; time.
He is a deep WordPress expert, so the countless hours of trial
and error and mistakes a new or intermediate user would make, are avoided.
Rather than search and read myriad(often contradictory)
resources, WordPress Bible provides a trustworthy, thorough manual
for beginner to expert online publishing with WordPress.
#WPBible includes over 600 pages of thoughtfully edited progressive
instruction, and a companion website further furnishes all code files
mentioned in this tome.
If you buy only one Wordpress resource, this should be it.
B. Henry said
First of all, the packaging from Amazon is poor. When order a few hundred dollars of books, you expect them to be properly packaged and arrive without the pages bent up. The book does a good job of covering Wordpress, working with templates and plugins. Fairly intermediate level on all topics. It does miss some content that is readily available on the internet, such as the new post_thumbnail functionality. The paper used in the book is cheap, ink bleeds through the pages, cause of all the ERRORS I have to make note of in the book. When I pay money for a book it should not contain as many errors as this book has. I think DigginInto WP is a better book.
Jesse Luna said
I've been developing Web sites for over 12 years and jumped into WordPress design about two years ago.
This book will help me super charge my development. Having come from a .Net developing background, I've only been tweaking PHP code and using software to create 80% of my new theme code. This book will give me the tools to further explore the code and learn how to do things from scratch.
In addition, the WordPress Bible provides great sets of "cheat sheets" to help figure out some of the complexities of theme layouts, the dreaded loop, and other structures.
I've also been Alpha testing the WordPress 3.0 code and the contents of the book are still highly relevant. In fact, I've never used the WordPress MU functionality but will take the tips and information in this book to help direct me on the 3.0 multi-site setup which is still being developed.
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in taking their blogs to the next level and for WordPress designers and developers. I can't wait to use the book to get under the hood of my next project and super charge that sucker.
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