Customer Reviews

WordPress 2

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I generally don't complain about someone else's hard work and I've stumbled across some bad books in the past. This is the only negative review of a book that I've felt compelled to write.

Although this book may be fine for taking care of basic tasks, it doesn't offer much help in terms of getting the program installed and running on your server so that you can actually use the functionality. If you want that kind of support, the authors pretty much refer you to the WordPress support online or the documents that came with your various software programs. If you've never been to the WordPress support forums and you are a beginner, it can be very confusing. They do go into detail on some pretty simple tasks like logging in, which anyone who uses the web for anything ought to know already.

The book calls itself a "visual quick start guide," but be warned...the graphical diagrams (figures) are predominantly only 2" x 2.5" and they are entire screenshots. The ink used to produce them is more grey than black, so even if you don't have any eye trouble you'll find them almost useless (even with the diagrams that are slightly bigger). For example, the authors tell you to look at the figures to understand how your directories should appear in more detail than the written steps in the book, but the font is so small in the figures that it is unreadable.

Sadly, this book has proved of absolutely no use to me so far.

I've had reasonable luck with the Visual Quickstart series (the PHP/MySQL books are very helpful, in my opinion) but this volume has proven confusing right from the start, and that seems pretty odd for a how-to book on software that's basically self-explanatory. I got as far as the discussion on how use sidebar widgets, which precedes by 5 chapters the discussion of how to install a theme that utilizes sidebar widgets. Pretty crazy. Buy a different book (or just use the WordPress documents on-line).

I have just started building my website using WordPress and bought this book to help me understand the intricacies of WordPress. The book falls way short of providing any sort of help. It is supposed to be a 'QuickStart Guide' which means that it should help in getting up and running quickly. It fails miserably in this task. Too thin on substance. No clear instructions on even the simplest of tasks e.g., it shows you to create a new page but doesn't say anything about how to make that page availble on the homepage via a link.

Although I'm not a novice with Wordpress, I read this book a few times and picked up some great tips. I think it's worth the price for a beginning to intermediate Wordpress blogger.

That said, Wordpress has awesome, voluminous online documentation in their Codex and forums, so there's not a lot of new info in this book that can't be found online, but it's presented in an easy, logical, and very portable way.

Also, since the publishing, WP has upgraded to version 2.1 which has slightly changed the admin interface, but not enough to make the book confusing.

I've used Blogger platform before and wanted to build entirely new WordPress Blog with my own Domain and Webhosting. I'm so glad that I've purchased this book. It showed almost everything from how to install WordPress on your server, customize it, and manage it. All the instructions are very easy to follow and features plenty of screenshots. There are many useful tips on almost every page. One Downside of this book is that WordPres 2.2 just released and some of the plugin in the book may not be compatible. Otherwise this book is Excellent.

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.

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.

I was surprised at how poorly written this guide was. Other titles from this series have been very helpful in real-world situations- this book was little more then a very well written advertisement for the product. The image quality is VERY very poor. Again, this series has produced some very good books- this one, however, was a disappointment. The online documentation at Wordpress was much more helpful.

Perhaps increasing the size of the book would help with the image quality?!? As is, they are worthless.
:(

This book gives you a lot of important basics you need in order to start with a Word Press Blog. And there's some advanced material as well. Did you know that you can do CMS with Word Press?

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.