Will Dee

Anyone who wants to design, publish and manage their own WordPress web site will be well served by George Plumley’s “WordPress 24-Hour Trainer.” This book, and its included companion DVD, guide the reader through the process of understanding, installing and using WordPress. The chapters are presented in a thoughtful, well organized manner.

What I appreciated most about Plumley’s approach was his focus. He spends sufficient time on each chapter, but avoids the temptation to delve so deeply into any specific topic that the book’s readers become lost.

The downsides are few. Plumley doesn’t include DVD lessons for the first two chapters (essentially Part One of the book.) He could have included brief lessons (pointers really) on thinking about and planning a web site. True, these lessons, had they been included, wouldn’t have been strictly about WordPress–and that is the book’s purpose. Still, I can’t help but see this as an unfortunate omission.

In short, if you are a small business person who needs to build a WordPress web site, or someone who wants to launch a Word Press web site for personal reasons, this is the book for you. If you are someone who wants to know more about WordPress, this book can certainly provide that–although it is not strictly intended for that purpose.

A word about the price. The books lists for $44.99 (US) and $53.99 (Canada.) Amazon sells it for considerably less, but it is still an expensive book. Even considering that there is a DVD included, the book is on the pricey side. But that seems to be the way of any book considered to be a “text book.” When I wrote my second book, Remote LAN Access: A Guide for Networkers and the Rest of Us, the publisher said, “What price shall we set for your book? We were thinking 40 or 50 dollars.” Knowing the text books tend to sell for more, I asked them to keep the price around $30 which they did. So you can see that, based on my experience as an author, George Plumley’s “WordPress 24-Hour Trainer” is pricey but not overpriced.

Rating: 4 / 5

WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites

This “24-hour trainer” guide in how to optimize your WordPress page is not only incredibly helpful, but it’s easy to understand and follow along. I have been managing a WordPress site for about a year now, and while experience is always the best way to learn, this book will be a huge help for beginners. Those who have been maintaining a WordPress site might not be willing to splurge on this book, but I think even the most experienced WordPress bloggers can find value in what it has to offer.

For one, EVERYthing is covered in this book, even things you wouldn’t think of. The troubleshooting in this book is intuitive, and doesn’t necessarily reflect trying to fix technical problems. The author imagines a problem arising, and he addresses it.

Additionally, it’s not a complete bore to read as most of these technical books can be. It’s easy on the eyes, and you’ll want to try things out, even if you had no plans to do so.

It also comes with a DVD where you literally sit down and watch how these techniques are applied. It couldn’t be any more thorough.

Highly recommended!

Rating: 5 / 5

WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites

I was somewhat hesitant to buy a tutorial book that had not been reviewed yet (this book is copyright 2010 and came out Dec. 09), but I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised. This book offers from-the-ground-up instruction with all the basics from how to install WordPress to customizing a template.

The author, George Plumley, has a pleasant style that is neither condescending to the newbie or goofy like I have found some of the “yellow books” to be. I haven’t found any fluff here, just solid step-by-step advice and lessons.

I really was just following along and not thinking about whether the book is “good” or “bad”, just going through it. Then, in Lesson 7: Working with the Text Editor, I found myself recognizing one of the many gems in this book. As someone who has struggled with more than one text editor until I found out that if you copy/paste from someplace else you need to get rid of the formatting first, I know that this author had the non-geek in mind when he wrote this. His advice is to open a text program such as Notepad and paste the text in there, then copy/paste from Notepad into the editor in WordPress and the excess coding will be stripped away. Now, this is basic information for a lot of people, but remember the first time you tried to figure out why that Word formatting kept showing up in your WordPress text editor? Yes, this author had that person in mind and gently drops in a paragraph with a couple of sentences in it addressing the problem and suggesting a solution.

I have hired a designer to do websites in WordPress for a couple of clients and I wanted to learn to do it myself. I am confident that I’ll be able to do it myself next time, thanks to the information provided in this book. The author spends some time going over some of the basics of site planning and organization, basic design, SEO, and backups. If you are a budding website builder, you’ll get a lot of time-tested information here. Yes, many books go deeper into each of these subjects, but for the person wanting to put their first site together or get a refresher on the basics, why buy another book if you don’t have to? There’s plenty of meat to digest here.

The CD is a great bonus, too.

If you have dabbled with WordPress but knew you were only scratching the surface, do yourself a favor and invest in this book. Certainly, there are those that will say that all of this information is available for free on the web. Yeah, but not in step-by-step form and not in a format you can carry along with you when you’re waiting somewhere or need to find the information quickly.

I don’t know this author, but I do know that if he writes any other books about a subject that I’m interested in, I’m quite likely to buy it based on my experience with this book/CD combo. I buy and read a lot of techy type books and if I ever owned a book that deserves “6 stars”, this is it. This is the gold standard by which all tech-related books should be measured for common sense writing style.

Rating: 5 / 5

WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites