Head First Wordpress Review

WordPress is by far, the best blogging platform ever. Being Free and Open source, it cherishes the largest theme & plug-in collection than any other blogging platforms. Head First WordPress is* the book* to get you acquainted with basics of WordPress Blogging.

The book starts with explaining the two ways of installing WordPress:

• the easy one click installation method provided by many web hosting companies and
• the 5 Minute WordPress installation.

Then It moves down to topics like

1. Changing Themes/ Theme Customization(i.e. making Child themes),
2. WordPress Plugins,
3. WordPress as CMS,
4. Managing  Authors/Editors for blog,
5. Publishing Video Pod-casts and embedding them,
6. Securing WordPress and making a backup of the same.

The book ends with explanation on speeding up WordPress,CDN (Content delivery Networks),etc. The Author concludes the book by covering 1-page introduction on Mobile Hosting, WordPress SEO, Mobile WordPress, PHP, etc .

Pros

1. Like All Head First Books, this book maintains Fun and intuitive way of teaching.
2. Sometimes, while using WordPress, We come across situations when WordPress itself cannot perform a specific task (like uploading the image to a server with lower Group Permissions). For such situations, the Author becomes our savior and delivers valuable information (like changing the Group Permissions via FTP software).
3. For those who are completely new to Web, a small introduction on FTP, Web-Server, Creating database,etc is also given.
4. Meager understanding of HTML/CSS is required.

Cons

Although this book is for beginners, it could have covered more on topics such as :

1. Sharing content via Facebook, Twitter and other social media; and related topics such as using Featured Image.
2. theme customization in terms of PHP,
3. Responsive CSS ( Since Responsive Web design is gaining lot of momentum these days in web world)

Target Audience:

1. Those thinking of starting their own blog. No prior knowledge is required. Honestly you should be well acquainted with using computer. Although a basic understanding of HTML/CSS will be beneficial to you.
2. Front End developers who are looking out for a springboard to dive in WordPress.
3. Again, like most of the Head First Books, this is start from here book and not a complete reference for Ninjas.

SPID.er Rating 7/10

Additional Links

1. Website of Jeff Siarto, The Author 
2. Twitter Link of Jeff Siarto