Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Nightmare In Progress
Comment:
The two books :
WordPress Complete by Hasin Hayder
and
WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
are worthwhile sources for the individual that lacks the expertise to setup the WordPress program. Now don't misunderstand what I say next. If you are a complete novice, get the books. Be fully aware that both books will NOT be sufficient to reach normal insanity while getting WordPress setup, if you're requirements go beyond the norm. Am familiar to Blogging and a bit aware of WordPress usage, but it became a total nightmare to reach the results that I was looking for. Seriously lacking are examples of "how and where" to actually insert / place what was being expounded upon. Seemed that every set of "how to" was chopped off at the most critical point and leaves one floundering and frustrated, Both books and even the official sites lack the explicit "where to insert" the talked on code. Many so called experts suffer from the "I know it so well" syndrome" that they overlook the "critical" aspect from a novices point of view. To have elaborated on a specific subject, without giving the most crucial bit of information "showing an example of where" is, to me a cardinal offense. It is recognized that it is near impossible to cover every detail required for total success with an installation, but what is covered, SHOULD be presented with clear and full details. There is no middle ground here. You are either sailing along smoothly, or you are floundering from lack of crucial details. I was in the latter group. WordPress by the way is a neat program, and for most users, will be relatively easy to master. If you have certain specific needs, be prepared to sweat it through, along with much aggravation.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Truth in Advertising
Comment: I'm an amateur trying to use Wordpress to get my family weblog looking and behaving in accordance with my vision for it. I've taught myself a little html/css/php/etc but was hitting a wall with the wp codex and I hoped this book would get me over. Well, I didn't learn much besides what is easily picked up in scanning the codex howto. This book was a bit too superficial for my needs. What I would really like is someone to step through the code line by line, explaining what calls are being made and why and how they can be manipulated. This is too difficult for me to follow just looking at the wp files themselves. And that is not the audience for this book. So, my fault for buying this book, erroneously thinking that it would not in fact live up to its title.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Practical how-to manual
Comment: I bought this book because it was the only comprehensive beginner's guide to WordPress that I could find, and it was also up to date (important in this rapidly changing field). This was my first "Dummies" purchase; I've always hated that title and the implicit putdown it conveys.
I was pleasantly surprised. Lisa Sabin-Wilson knows her stuff, she writes well, and the advice is practical and easy to follow. The book uses a logical progression, teaching us step-by-step what WordPress is, what it can do, and where you can go to find further resources. Sections address important topics such as plugins, self-hosting, theme selection and development, migrating your blog from another site, and much more.
I was mostly looking for a guide on using WordPress as a website content management system (CMS), and although one chapter does address this, I wish the book had covered this in more depth. Also, I would have liked to read more about design and style issues. However, no one book can do it all, and at almost 400 pages this book was long enough. (Although it's a very quick read; it took me only one morning to get through it, and not all chapters will be relevant to every reader.)
I recommend it to anyone wanting to gain basic familiarity with WordPress (and related technical jargon), see whether it's the thing for you and, if so, get started using it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Oddly, this book seems to skim the basics
Comment: I thought this would be a good book for me, as I know some basic html, and have written my own simple web pages. But I'm no code jockey.
But for a 384 page book about a software program for blogging, there are precisely two pages about formatting the text and appearance of posts made in Wordpress. This seems to me to be the core of the blogging experience for most writers. I just want to create nice looking posts, with text and images. The program itself provides very few tools, and also strips out attempts to use code to do simple things like add paragraph breaks or tab indents, or change font sizes. It would be helpful if this book included the secret to making these simple formatting changes.
Most of the chapters seem to follow this theme, of giving just a superficial introduction to where to access a function in the program, with little additional info beyond what is right there on the computer screen.
But lots about Multi User Wordpress. I was hoping for something that would help me get started blogging right away, and make something that looks good.
A real dissappointment.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Useful Book
Comment: This book helped me get a professional quality WordPress blog up and running without any pain. I probably could have figured out most of what I would have needed to know myself. However, this book gave me some basic information and concepts so that I had the confidence to jump in and to do it easily. I set my blog up on my own hosted server. The book gave step-by-step instructions for uploading WordPress software and configuring it so that it worked immediately. I was able to find a free theme and customize it to my specific needs with a minimal knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP. (Not a deficiency of the book, but WordPress is not yet an ideal environment to create a non-blog web site. This is my next task and I'd love to find a product as easy to use as WordPress, which would allow me to do it.) I am glad that I purchased this book; it was worth the money.
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