Review: “WordPress: The Missing Manual”

Review: “WordPress: The Missing Manual”
by Matthew MacDonald; O’Reilly Media

The Missing Manual series covers practical how-to information for popular topics for which there is no official manual. This book covers the popular WordPress software that powers blogs and websites worldwide. I am reviewing the Mobi e-book version for the Kindle.

I highly recommend this e-book to anyone with an interest in blogging using WordPress. This book is mainly targeted at users who intend to run the WordPress software on their own web server, but even those (like me!) who use the free WordPress site (http://wordpress.com) can get a lot of useful how-to information out of this e-book.

In fact, “WordPress: The Missing Manual” can take you step-by-step from signing up for a free WordPress blog to your own customized and professional WordPress site complete with the plug-ins you’ll need to monetize your blog. Appendix A contains the crucial how-to you’ll need to migrate your existing blog — and more importantly, your followers — from WordPress.com to your new custom site. There is plenty of advice along the way about how to set up your blog’s layout and how to run your blog professionally.

If you’re only planning on using the free WordPress.com site, this book is still well-worth buying. Blog page administration will be fairly consistent no matter which way you’re using WordPress, and I wish I’d had this available to me when I was setting up my own blog site.

This isn’t just the basics, though. Later chapters of the book are directly targeted at the most advanced users and will teach you how to “get under the hood” of how WordPress works and how to make it do what you want it to do.

There are typos scattered here and there throughout, but nothing that will leave you scratching your head and wondering what the author meant. By and large, this e-book is well-formatted and renders very well on the Kindle. There were a few issues here and there, such as Table 1-1 that cuts off the right side in portrait view but is fully visible in landscape view. I didn’t notice anything that would make the e-book unusable.

I wanted to be able to “test out” this book by migrating my own blog, but I am unable to do that at this time. If I am able to migrate my blog in the future, I will revisit this review with a Part Two.

Reviewer’s Note: I am a member of the O’Reilly Blogger Review program and received a free copy of the “WordPress: The Missing Manual” which was used to write this review.