I purchased this book with 2 other titles: a DVD,
"How to Theme WordPress" by Aleks Monahan which I think is a very good and more advanced tutorial specifically on template design and theming WordPress (review already posted on that DVD's page) and
"WordPress For Dummies" by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.
This book is a good book for novices and I think it has the potential of becoming the de facto standard for novices instead of the bulkier "WordPress for Dummies" by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.
If you're new to WordPress, get this book. The page layout was very nice and the fonts were easy on the eye, I finished it in just 1 day. It will get you going with the basics very quickly (except in one instance, read below). It's written in a way that assumes no previous knowledge of WordPress. For example, on page 3, the author says: "WordPress can be extended by little bits of code called plug-ins." This smooth and flowing style of writing can be very helpful to you if you're a new WordPress blogger.
One section where this book fails truly miserably (and hence the 4-star review) is the section "Setting up the MySQL Database". I'm not new to WordPress. I've used it for blogging for more than 2 months now on the free wordpress.com site, and I'm now beginning to consider moving to my own domain website. I'm sad to say that the "Setting up the MySQL Database" section failed me there.
The author says "you need to create a MySQL database... the installation will fail if you don't set this database up beforehand." But then he says that setting up the database is "beyond the scope of this book" and gives some very brief pointers that do not compare to the level of detail most users in need of this information would find helpful. I was disappointed that I had to look elsewhere for this information e.g. it's covered in Sabin-Wilson's "WordPress for Dummies" in more than 2 pages and on Aleks Monahan's "How to Theme WordPress" DVD. I wished McNulty covered it too. It would have made the book a "complete" guide for new bloggers.
Most other sections were very useful. The author discusses some very interesting features like how to set up your blog to accept posts by email and how to automate the process even more. The section explaining uploads and how to configure them is very helpful if you're like me interested in moving to your own WordPress site under your own private domain. I found the book also strong on how to handle media and images and enjoyed those sections.
I found Scott McNulty's information on templates in the themes section very shallow in comparison to
the DVD tutorial on theming by Aleks Monahan. This is not necessarily a negative. The book is intended for beginners after all and the author admits that what he's presenting is small tweaks to existing themes. For templates and theming, I highly recommend you purchase the DVD by Aleks Monahan. It's very good, an eye opener and nice to watch regardless of whether you want to create your template or not. I'm not ready to create my template yet, but found the DVD very informative and now that I've watched it, I might get to the stage of creating a template of my own sooner. You can use the templates chapter by McNulty as a primer.
The book also discusses plug-ins and how to open a plug-in to edit it if you want. The author also touches very slightly on how to start setting up a plug-in but the information again is very shallow in this section. Some code showing how to build a sample plug-in would have been great. 1 full example would be enough. The section "Plug-ins no blog should be without" is also very good and he mentions the WP Security Scan plug-in which I'm getting for sure, very useful, and other useful plug-ins too.
If you're new to WordPress, buy this book, it's a light read, really easy on the eye (not to be underestimated) and it's well written and nicely formatted. But don't depend on it as the only source. It's a good way to get started. See the other resources mentioned.
