WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites (Book & DVD)
- ISBN13: 9780470554586
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Don’t let WordPress intimidate you. WordPress 24-Hour Trainer is a unique lesson-based book that walks you through the essential parts of WordPress. Each lesson is streamlined to teach a specific aspect of WordPress, helping you to focus on just what you need in order to get the task accomplished. If you learn better visually, this book provides you with a video to accompany each lesson. This book is the perfect guide to Planning and preparing your site for WordPress Installing WordPress Writing, tagging, and publishing a post Working with the text editor Styling paragraphs and creating lists Working with media files Linking, aligning, and sizing an image … More >>
wordpress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites (Book & DVD)
If you are new to WordPress, you certainly could do worse in your choice of books. I have been using WordPress for several years and this is one of the better books I’ve seen on using WordPress. Even as an experienced user, I found some tidbits in here that were helpful. But as a new user to WordPress, you should also be aware of the fact that WordPress is under constant development and consequently upgrades are fast and furious. This is a good thing to the WordPress power user, but to authors and publishers must be a pretty big issue since any book released soon becomes outdated due to the relentless march forward of WordPress development. As I write this review WordPress is already at version 2.9.2 and version 3.0 is right around the corner. Unfortunately this book is written with version 2.8 in mind so it won’t even mention many of the new features introduced with version 2.9.* of WordPress. However there is still a great amount of useful information presented in these chapters that will pertain to WordPress 2.9.*, but just be aware that WordPress is quickly marching forward so this book will become less useful as time goes on.
The author is gifted with an excellent style of writing. He presents his material in a very easy to read manner while avoiding being too chummy or too technical. Each chapter has exercises and if you complete the exercises, you will learn a great deal and gain hands-on experience. The book takes a fairly straightforward approach that a beginner will appreciate. The process of installing WordPress is discussed as well as a good explanation of the Dashboard and how to move around in the Admin area.
A few quibbles such as in Lesson 8 the author discusses Blockquotes, what they are used for and how some WordPress themes style them in different ways. He then shows a graphic of 4 different and attractive ways that Blockquotes can be styled. He neglects however to tell you how you can actually change the styling of your Blockquotes, probably because it involves modifying the cascading style sheet which he may have felt was beyond the scope of a beginner book. But he could of at least mentioned that instead of ignoring the issue completely. He also fails to discuss the Search Engine Optimization ramifications of using Headings properly.
One area of the book really disappoints, and that is Part X: Extending WordPress. Although not necessarily the fault of the author since his book was written with WordPress v2.8 in mind, I found that several of the plugins mentioned in Part X were not compatible with the latest version of WordPress due to the fact that the plugin authors had not yet updated their plugins to work with the latest version of WordPress. Perhaps they worked with v2.8 of WordPress, but they did not work with 2.9.2 at the time I am writing my review.
Overall though, this is a solid book on WordPress for the beginner to intermediate user.
Rating: 4 / 5
The author notes the book is for “those who’ve never built a website and those who’ve never built a WordPress website”. I am of the latter group and found this a great book to clue me in on what I should know about WordPress. I picked up some good tips that I have started to utilize – I was particularly interested in search engine optimization. The book is laid out well, easy to read, and includes helpful images. The book covers more than I would have thought to look into as a relative beginner, so I’m really glad I had this to point everything out.
The one thing I was slightly disappointed in was that some topics were more or less a “go here for this plug-in” sort of deal with not a lot of additional information to explain how to work with the plug-in. I understand that is not necessarily the purpose of the book, and if the additional information were included every time, the book would have to be longer, etc, but it is something I wished were included. Expect to add more time on top of learning WordPress from this book to learning how to work with a few of the plug-ins on your own time through independent research.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book is clear and helpful if you know little about WordPress and using a CMS. It would have value as a reference book and a point of orientation for people starting out in WordPress (.org)
Still, the best way to learn WP is hands-on, and much of this material is easy to learn on your own or via WordPress’ text and video tutorials. The “24 Hours” spent reading this book would be better spent learning by doing. If that’s too daunting, WordPress might not be the right platform for you anyway.
WordPress (.org) has come a long way in ease of usability, but if you want more out of your blog than just being a journal, things can get confusing and frustrating pretty quickly — see plugin conflicts, video in sidebars, canonical issues …
The more complicated aspects of WP, such as working with PHP, CSS, javascript and hand-editing site elements such as headers and nav bars, aren’t within the book’s scope — I’d think these topics would be helpful in the latter part of a book such as this.
Some of the information in the book seemed dubious, such as the section on SEO. Most of it was on target, though, and the author has a gift for explaining things.
As a confident but far from ace user, I did learn a few things, but not much.
Rating: 3 / 5
WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites (Book & DVD) is a very nice resource for setting up a WordPress site. This volume took me a little over a week to get through. But it is not overly dense, like so many similar technical reference books. Not only will this provide good instruction in setting up a WP site, it will also be a good reference for novice users to keep as they continue expanding and growing their sites.
THE BOOK
The content of the book is very well organized. There is enough detail to satisfy both techies and novices. In that sense, the book provides a good quick introduction to WordPress for several audiences.
The core functionality of WordPress is covered very well for the most part. Nice basic treatments are included for planning, installation, administration, content management and customization. There are even short sections on things many other books forget, such as backing up your site.
There are some areas I would have covered in more detail. The final sections on using plug-ins and extending WordPress are particularly light. This is not really an advanced topic because almost everybody using WordPress will have to set-up plug-ins.
The sections on expanding WordPress beyond the basic functionality, Part X, includes three short sections related to plug-ins. The section on installing and activating plug-ins is light but adequate. But better plug-ins could have been chosen as examples. And the section on other methods of extending WordPress functionality is far too brief.
For example, the sample plug-ins that were outlined include NextGEN Gallery, a popular photo management plug-in, and Form Creation, one of several form creation plug-ins available. While these are certainly useful plug-ins, they seem to be low-hanging fruit in terms of the level of complexity in setting them up. By the time most users have read through the entire book, even novices should be able to set-up either of those plug-ins without too much extra instruction.
It would have been nice if they included some of the more complex back-end plug-ins, such as AJAX or php, which many users will invariably have to integrate into their sites from day two. Needless to say, you will have to seek out other resources to help you with those things. Some plug-ins are technically complex enough that they could require a book’s worth of instruction in order to be set up functionally and securely.
THE DVD
The DVD is a nice bonus. There are good tutorials and nice examples included that can be easily aid you in creating your own pages. Using the DVD on your computer requires you to accept the license agreement, but other than that it is pretty self-explanatory.
The best thing about the DVD is that specific examples from the book are included on the DVD with easy-to-follow chapter references. That ensures that if you don’t fully understand a section, you can reinforce what you have read with an easy-to-follow video tutorial.
CONCLUSION
The book stands alone well on its own. There is a very nice balance of good content and logical organization. The DVD really does a good job of reinforcing the book’s content by providing nice example tutorials that correspond to the different topics. Either the book or the DVD alone would each be worth the price of admission. Together, they are pretty much a slam dunk.
The only caveat I will provide is that those looking for a deep dive into advanced topics will, clearly, want to look for other resources.
This is definitely recommended. Enjoy.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a very nice comprehensive manual for all of the features of WordPress and the instructional DVD with videos is a nice added bonus. However, if like me you’ve been working with WordPress already for a while and have configured your own blog, much of the material covered in this book will seem quite basic. This book is basically for beginners to WordPress.
Rating: 4 / 5