I grabbed this book just to see some of the latest capabilities and it is a good source for just that! If you want a great first-time 'how to' guide, this is the book for you!Karol provides a great flow in this book providing an introductory overview of Wordpress and the latest features published in this tool... I think I read that up to 15% of the web as we know it runs on Wordpress and it is a good way to see the power of this platform. Each chapter builds on the last, but is also a quick reference that you can jump to to answer questions.The last 70 pages of the book show you how to use Wordpress as your favorite non-blog platform... an example of how easy it is to build a simple website and add features in time when ready.Once again, Packt Publishing is delivering good content to masses! Glad to see it!

The fine folks at Packt Publishing asked me to have a look at their latest WordPress book, WordPress 3.7 Complete. This is the third edition in the WordPress Complete series, by Karol Krol and Aaron Hodge Silver. I am happy to recommend it to folks looking for a good introduction to WordPress.Full disclosure: I read the edition covering WordPress 2.7, when I started getting serious about learning WordPress, but missed the edition that covered v3.0.Packt specializes in web development and open source software books, so you shouldn’t be surprised that the strongest parts of the book are in this area. But you don’t have to know code to find good, solid information here. Chapter 3, “Creating Blog Content” offers a nice introduction to blogging that will help you start thinking about the kind of content to include in your blog, along with an introduction to the WordPress admin pages.The chapter on choosing themes has some excellent questions that you may not think to ask yourself before choosing a theme from the vast collection of choices.While there’s a basic introduction to WordPress.com, most of the book’s content relates to WordPress on an independent web host. It might have been nice to note what sections (like setting up widgets and working with the Media Library) apply to both the dot-com and dot-org sites.WordPress Complete really takes off in the second half, where Krol and Silver focus on creating and manipulating themes and plugins. I don’t know about you, but when I started messing with code, the first thing that scared me was the likelihood of me breaking stuff that was already working. Krol and Silver help break down that fear by showing you how to safely remove your header, footer and sidebar from an existing theme’s index.php file (“What, you want me to break my home page!?”), customize each new template file, and reassemble the new modules so that it all works.Another big plus for the beginning developer is an extensive section about building themes from scratch. After comparing this method with constructing themes with the help of a theme framework like Genesis, Thesis or Thematic, they advise:" … create your first theme manually, just to learn the craft and get to know all the basic structures and mechanisms sitting inside WordPress. Then, as the next step in your mastery (if you’re planning to work on other themes in the future), you can pick one of the popular theme frameworks, get deeply familiar with it, and use it as the base for your future themes from that point on. Such an approach will allow you to reach maximum time efficiency and save you the effort of dealing with the core set of functionalities that every theme needs, regardless of the design or purpose."After demystifying the process of theme and plugin creation, and introducing BuddyPress and WordPress MultiSite, Krol and Silver focus the last two chapters on “Creating a Non-Blog Website” using the increasingly powerful content management features WordPress offers.You’ll learn a bit about using Pages to create corporate and e-commerce sites, membership sites and the like. Can I say that as an author, I especially appreciated introducing custom post types by way of creating distinctive ways of listing books on your site? You may see something like this on michaelmccallister.com soon.Overall, WordPress 3.7 Complete is a fine introduction to WordPress and web development. Incidentally, don’t be upset that the book misses out on WordPress 3.8. With the increasing speed of WordPress core development, all us authors are at a distinct disadvantage–we can only type so fast!

....2014, is here!What's it going to take to get started?...more book(s), more on-line guru(s), more seminar(s) and more get rich "quick" programs.STOP!Karol's message (blog), has always been concise and right to the point. You can do it, but it takes work!Now, he has a book, that shows you in clear, concise steps, how to join the on-line world.You're getting more than a book, it's a community. Check out his blog.Thank you Karol, for this book and this opportunity.

Very good

This is an awesome reference for anyone be they beginner or above. It is a well thought out easy to understand book that i have no hesitation recommending to anyone wanting to understand wordpress. Well done Kurt, who also by the way replies in an instant to any questions you may have. Cannot recommend this book enough!!!