Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Avoid at all costs unless you are a total novice
Comment: "Complete" in no way describes this book. I have yet to find any mention of tagging, sessions, pages, or many other important aspects of WP. Part of the problem is that the book's index is almost non-existent. In all fairness, the author says that the book is for beginners; that said, the author spends far too much time reiterating the easy stuff (installation, how to create a basic blog entry, etc) that is explained for free on the WP web site (and dare I say in a much clearer way). Also, the figures look like they were printed-on-demand on a laser printer; this is not acceptable for a price tag like this (cf. O'Reilly's production values). I returned it right away.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Poorly written and overpriced.
Comment: The author may have mastered WordPress, but he has not mastered the English language. The book often reads like a grade school book report. For $40 dollars, I expected more substance and quality. There is a lot of filler material and the layout is poorly done. I suggest looking elsewhere.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Overpriced for Less Than Adequate Book
Comment: This book is written by an author with English as a second language, and it's not difficult to tell English is not his native language, as the book is poorly written. I'm an author and I've never posted a negative review of another author's work, but I was appalled at the poor value I received for $39.99.
This was the only book available on customizing CSS within WordPress, and I was sorely disappointed. The book is thin, doesn't cover even the simplest of tasks such as changing colors of an existing theme, and has a paltry index. The author even laughingly claims that "WordPress has some of the best documentation ever written." Are you kidding? The documentation is better than other blogging software, but to claim it's the "best ever written" defies credibility.
Don't waste your money and wait for the "WordPress for Dummies" to come out in October. I wish I had.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Practical, Hands-on Book!
Comment: This practical, hands-on book takes you from the basics of WordPress to how to modify important WordPress elements such as the sidebar. I have learned more from this book than I have from a year of culling through the online WordPress documentation.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incomplete in many areas, poorly laid out
Comment: This book reads more like a hardcopy of a bloggers notes to another blogger on how to install and customize WordPress. It spends more time glossing over descriptions and screenshots of other blog software and discussing the perceived shortcomings of WordPress mu (multi-user) than in discussing how to actually customizing a WordPress installation.
The screenshots often are on different pages than the text they go with, and most examples where the user might include more than a line or two of text simply copy and paste a single line over and over, usually extolling the virtues of the book's publisher (which joins several others on my list to avoid in the future.)
Several pages are spent covering how to use several FTP clients, yet none is spent on the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), one of the core needs for any meaningful customization of a WordPress site.
Very little of the WordPress API is discussed.
The author "explains" creating your own "widget" with very little description of what they are, and virtually none of why you would do so. He then follows with a sample of a "plug-in", yet a widget is in fact a specialized plug-in, so why are they presented in the reverse order? Very little is also done in terms of explaining how to customize a theme to allow the use of widgets, outside of providing a complete sidebar code page without showing which line(s) of code are the actual widget-enabling ones.
I realize that this is not a book about CSS or PHP, but neither is it a book about ftp software, which is after all a lot easier to use, yet more time is spent on how to use FTP than is spent on how to customize an existing theme.
Appears to be the better of the two books currently on the market that detail installing WordPress, but far from complete. Definitely needs a better editing job at the least. Certainly not worth $39.99.
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