One way of becoming a WordPress Guru is to follow the tutorials available online but it can become painful and time consuming process to search for the right tutorial. On the other hand, books are more organized. They help you easily kick-start the learning process by beginning from Step A and ending at Step Z. There are less chances of getting lost while you’re reading the book because the step-by-step process of the book ensures that you have necessary information available beforehand to achieve the next desired result.

I will review 5 WordPress books which will help you start your journey of becoming a WordPress Guru. After reading, you will end up with enough information to start managing your own WordPress Blog, creating and tweaking WordPress Themes or programming your own WordPress Plugins.

WordPress For Dummies

WordPress for Dummies starts from explaining the benefits of using WordPress and then briefly describes the difference between the three versions of WordPress, WordPress.com, Self-Hosted WordPress and WordPress MU. It then briefly explains the blogging basics in few pages.

WordPress for Dummies explains in detail how to manage, tweak and extend your WordPress.com (the hosted version) blog. The book explains how to download, upload, install, manage, customize and extend the Self-Hosted version of WordPress.

That’s not it, the book helps you understand the concepts behind the WordPress Themes, how to tweak them and how to create custom templates to use WordPress as a CMS.

To help you get started, the book reviews 10 plugins and wordpress themes which can be used on your WordPress blog. WordPress for Dummies has listed 10 real-word examples of how WordPress can be used as a CMS. The final chapter of the book is an how-to on migrating your blog posts and themes from different blogging platform to WordPress.

Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read

“Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read” starts with comparing the pros and cons of WordPress. It then compares the the difference between WordPress.com (Hosted Version) and WordPress.org (Self-Hosted Version). The book has a better part on configuring and installing the self hosted version of WordPress. It then explains each part of the WordPress Admin Panel in it own chapter. The book explains how to find, install, customize or tweak WordPress themes and plugins. The book ends with a very useful troubleshooting section which can save time of the WordPress beginners.

The book is written in a more friendlier approach using simpler words and less jargon additionally, it uses vibrant colors and neat typography to make it more pleasing to read which is definitely an upper hand over “WordPress for Dummies”. Unfortunately, the book was written for WordPress 2.6 which is an older version of WordPress. The current stable version of WordPress is 2.7 and WordPress 2.8 is going to be out soon.

WordPress for Business Bloggers

WordPress for Business Bloggers is a different kind of book. This book focuses on how you can use plugins to add advanced but necessary features to your WordPress Blog. It deals with creating an engaging, search engine optimized, social media optimized and monetized blog all using the FREE plugins available for WordPress. The books teaches how you can monitor and analyze traffic of your blog and how you can create powerful video and image galleries just using WordPress.

WordPress for Business Bloggers is a practical book. It uses fictitious case study blog which is used to teach how you can transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional looking blog.

WordPress Theme Design

WordPress Theme Design contains all the information required to customize or create your very own-own WordPress Theme from the scratch. The book starts with helping you set up your development tools, sandbox, theme structure. It then describes how to code the markup for the theme, how to debug the theme and how to take it live to the WordPress. The last 3 chapters of the book includes guides to further enhance the theme using minor tweaks, cookbook recipes and WordPress Plugins.

The book has a quick but friendly step-by-step approach. It explains the theming process by creating WordPress Theme from scratch. By creating a theme from scratch, you will have better understanding of WordPress Themes which will help you painlessly modify other WordPress Themes to your liking.

The book can be used by normal WordPress users or Designers since the book, regardless of web development experience, has clear step-by-step instructions on how to create your very own WordPress Themes however, familiarity with web development and WordPress will help you gain maximum benefits from the book.

WordPress Plugin Development

WordPress Plugins are essential part of WordPress. They plugins can make WordPress do just about anything e.g from making it easier to administer to adding small social media based widgets to the sidebar.

WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide) will teach you how you can build basic plugins and widgets to use on your blog or for sharing it to the friendly open-source community of WordPress.

The book will help you learn the architecture of the WordPress Plugin API, master the database design to manipulate with WordPress posts, pages, users, comments and taxonomies dynamically, use AJAX and JQuery to dynamically generate and filter the content, access third-party APIs like Flickr and Twitter, implement localization support for foreign languages and more. With this book, you will be able to learn the power of hooks and actions. You can use hooks and actions to change the way content is formatted on posts and pages, you can add menus and sub-menus to the admin panel for your plugin options, add pages to the navigation without fiddling around with the markup and etc.

The books comes with a bonus chapter on Subversion. Subversion is a version controlling system which is used by WordPress Plugins Repository to add and maintain the open-source plugins. The chapter will explain how you can maintain and manage your plugin with WordPress however, the examples can be used on any kind of project.

The book is based on practical approach, each chapter builds a new plugin. That way it will be easier to understand and remember the information as you go through the book. The book can be used as a reference as some chapters are essential for day-to-day use such as the chapter on security of plugin.