Charles Lau dot Com

I have just finished reading WordPress For Dummies. It is currently promoted by WordPress.org on the front page like as though it is published by the folks from WordPress. In actual fact, this book is authored by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. This book is written very into details from the direction of someone who is really a dummy to start with. I don’t recommend this book for anyone who is already using WordPress to blog and has not started reading any such books yet because it is too shallow for us.

As you can see, how outstanding this book is in the website. It is bright yellow, making the whole website focus on this book instead of the more important contents on other parts of the website.

This book is good for those who are looking for a blog software to start with. It is a step-by-step book to teach us by hand, working towards the market where we don’t know anything about HTML, CSS and PHP.

When I first got my hand on this book, I thought of this book to give me a headstart of writing a theme for my own blog. And I realized how misleading she is in telling us about the few most important template files to take care of. Well, as I read further into WordPress documents, there are only index.php and style.css to take care of which are the most important.  Nevertheless, this book gives me some insights about WordPress MU.  And by the way, this book is starting to get outdated with the new WordPress 2.5 released!

This book basically treats you like a dummy in all programming languages.  Meaning that she doesn’t assume you knowing anything at all.  If you want to start WordPress from scratch, this book is probably right for you.  With that misleading point, I believe she does have “created” some standards of her own to make it easier for dummies to follow before they realize they are learning in a somewhat “wrong” direction. Anyway, at least it is still a direction to bring you to where you want to.

Start reading about WordPress for yourself to find out.