- ISBN13: 9780470554586
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites
Product Description
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WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites
I should probably start off by saying that I’ve been using WordPress for a few years now, on four different personal sites, and countless others for friends. I’ve built a LAMP / WP server from scratch, and I’ve clicked “Install” in Fantastico, with everything in between.
I picked this up hoping for some quick reference guides for what goes where (e.g., what should be in wp-content, tinkering with the config files, etc.). However, that’s not even remotely who this book is for. Incidentally, that is NOT why I’m giving this a relatively low rating. The “24-Hour Trainer” wasn’t missed on me, and I knew this wasn’t WordPress Unleashed.
The first 27 (yes, twenty seven) chapters are aimed at people who have never used a CMS before, and would be baffled by one that’s well known for being intuitive and easy to use. There’s a chapter dedicated to embedding video, for instance. When there’s some talk of design and layout, the author recommends you hire a designer or ask the person who installed WordPress for you. This book is an exercise in taking simple “hand holding” instructions and turning them in to simpler “I’ll just carry you instead” chapters.
Once you cross that chapter, though, it’s apparently assumed that you’re more than comfortable with CSS, and magically know what to edit and where it lives in the hierarchy. Seriously, it’s the strangest and most useless transition I’ve ever seen in a book like this. It wouldn’t be that unusual if there was at least some foundation for this in preceding chapters, but there really isn’t anything between “You should hire someone to center your banner” and “Okay, now you know how to embed a YouTube video by clicking on the Embed Media icon. It’s CSS time!”
This book is fine if you have little to no confidence in yourself to read and understand the simple, plain English instructions on the WordPress site and that are built in to WordPress. Otherwise, you’re better off skimming over the documentation from WordPress and poking your head in to some forums if you run in to trouble.
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.
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.
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.
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.