Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
WordPress is an open-source personal publishing platform that is easy to use, flexible, and highly customizable. Although used primarily for publishing blogs, WordPress can easily be used to create and maintain complete Web sites.
Taking the average blogger further than blogspot can, WordPress allows bloggers to create more complicated sites with their open-source technology, rather than blogger which is limited by HTML changes to their templates.
This easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide shows you how to install, use, and customize WordPress to get the most from the software. Includes tips that explain why certain techniques are better than others, how to watch for potential problems, and where readers can find more information.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Good resource overall, but a bit short on important details
Customer Rating:
I recommend this book, with a couple of caveats. It's a fairly helpful guide, intended mostly for novices. That being the case, certain how-to explanations are left out, it being assumed you know the WordPress basics already. You will need to go, with book in hand, and play around with the software a bit to see what the authors are exactly describing. This is usually what you need to do with software anyway to fully understand it. Buy this book and use it, just don't expect it to be an A-Z bible.
Clear and Easy to Follow (especially with the Pictures)
Customer Rating:
I found the book clear and very easy to follow. The pictures might be a bit bigger. But compared to WordPress for dummies, which focuses less on WordPress on your own server, I found WordPress 2 great. I can follow what is going on and what to do. That is what I sought. It makes everything (or almost everything) quite understandable.
An adequate start but omits the important points
Customer Rating:
This book provides an adequate overview of Wordpress, with plenty of screenshots to illustrate steps to take. It's a book though for people already equipped with familiarity with the basics of blogging and web coding, not for beginners with no exposure to HTML or PHP. Lacks clear explanations of terms that Wordpress users should be familiar with and omits step-by-step instructions of the two most important tasks anyone who uses Wordpress to publish and maintain a blog should be prepared to complete: 1) backing up your Wordpress files and database, and 2) install the latest version of Wordpress. Help with performing those two tasks was why I purchased this book. I was so disappointed that it contained no instructions to help me with these essential tasks. This book works as a supplementary text.
Solid mediocre
Customer Rating:
Has useful stuff but misses important stuff, for instance: it says that someone can have a profile of subscriber [easily discerned from wordpress documentation] who can only read, but doesn't tell how to make that real. Everyone can read unless something is done to restrict site, so what did he tell us? Worthwhile book only because so little else exists.
Keep Looking
Customer Rating:
I agree with many of the other reviews that I have seen here. I usually don't right a review and I usually give most tech books the benefit of the doubt. I gave up on this book in Chapter 6. The first 5 chapters are nothing more than going through every page of Worpress admin and reading the input field. With no real explanation of what items do. I have been looking for a worpress book for a while and this was the first one I came across I was very disappointed. With that being said I will keep looking for a good wordpress book but in the mean time I will probably be better off just getting a good MySQL + PHP book.
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