WordPress by the book: Head First WordPress

Are you new to WordPress and wished your new blog came with an owner’s manual? Even with all the online WordPress help out there, you may want to consider buying a reference book.

On book you may want to consider – and there are many books on WordPress – is Head First WordPress: A Brain-Friendly Guide to Creating Your Own Custom WordPress Blog. It explains how to:

• Get started on WordPress from scratch
• Change your blog’s look and feel
• Use WordPress as a content management system
• Tell the difference between tags and categories
• Add contributors and editors to your blog or website
• Use video and plug-ins
• Use WordPress for podcasting and syndication
• Keep your WordPress site secure
• Make your site fast
• Do a bunch of other things, from cloud hosting to using BuddyPress

Who is Head First WordPress for – expert or newbie?

Head First WordPress does a nice job explaining all that – and more. However, if you’re a newbie blogger – or an experienced blogger who is new to WordPress – this book is either too technical or gives you a bunch of information you’re not interested in.

In fact, the introduction warns you to back away from this book if you are new to blogging and how websites work. Or if you’re interested in a reference book on WordPress plug-ins and tools.

However, if you’re experienced and know how to work with FTP, PHP, CSS, HTML, MySQL and all the rest of the techie alphabet soup, my guess is that this book will be too rudimentary for you. Or it will leave you wondering where this book was a few years back when you were trying to learn all this stuff!

If you’re between expert and newbie – and I’m place myself in this crowd – it’s a sure bet that you’ll learn a few things from Head First WordPress. In my case it was the difference between categories (general) and tags (more specific) and why you should sign up for a Gravatar account. It’s also cool to learn about that your WordPress blog can be turned into a real content management system (CMS) or how to use it to podcast.

In the meantime, I’ll leave the file uploading, permission setting, backup and security to my WordPress technical crew.

Anne-Marie Nichols is the Managing Editor of Mom Central Blogger University. You can also find her blogging up some healthy recipes at This Mama Cooks!

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Disclosure: Anne-Marie received a review copy of the book to facilitate this review.

Anne-Marie Nichols