, came to market in February this year.
The book is from the web design website Smashing Magazine, and is aimed at all those wordpress enthusiasts who want to benefit from one of the great strengths of he WordPress blogging platform -- to run a website with ultimate flexibility the wordpress platform offers when it comes to the look of the site.Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful, begins with an introduction to WordPress, followed by explaining extensively how Themes work. Later on it explains how to make your own themes.
The book also explains how to install WordPress on a computer with a local webserver for testing. It’s always good to make changes to a local copy, if one doesn’t want to risk his/her live website. The book offers instructions to accomplish this with Windows, Mac and Linux separately.
One of the most useful offerings of the book, which many will find handy is , the help the book provides to create child themes, that are based on an existing theme but customized to exact requirements. There are several chapters devoted to different kinds of templates with information on social media tools for WordPress and an introduction to plugins.
Overall, the book tries to provide an in-depth subject and can be great for those who want to do just that.
What is Good:
1) The fact that, this book addresses the wordpress themes (in wordpress all formatting is handled by the site’s ‘theme’ or template, allowing for a web admin to make big changes quickly just by installing a new template or tweaking the exiting one), the book is aimed at people who want to know how templates work, either to edit existing templates or to create their own right from scratch.
2) The book enlists a lot of programming code, which is extensively color coded, to help understand a block of code better.
What is Not Good:
1) The book is not for beginners. A user ideally needs some basic to advanced understanding of the languages used by WordPress (HTML, CSS and PHP). A basic understanding of a programming language means, knowing variables, tags, functions and how they are referenced.
2) The book generally doesn’t come handy as a reference book for any reader. You have to read it in its entirety.
3) The book’s editing and way of writing is not good as well. The book gives the impression, as if it’s compiled by people who run a very successful website(bloggers can share great things, but normally don’t follow traditional book writing rules).
Rating: 3 Out of 5
For who is the book?
The book is for those who have basic to advanced knowledge of programming; but are new to wordpress. An ideal buyer for this book will be the one who is aware of programming parlance and wants to enrich his/her site or create wordpress themes. --------
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