25 Best Books for WordPress Bloggers

WordPress is such an easy CMS that even a small kid can understand it, but books are certainly needed if you want to explore the uncountable features that WordPress offers.

WordPress is not only a good Blogging system but also a good CMS. Once can easily learn how to install, setup and run a blog using WordPress but if you want to do more then just installing and want to be a good WordPress blogger, coder or designer then you will certainly need to catch hold of a guide or a book.

So taking this in mind I have tried to list down the best WordPress books which will help you to learn basic tasks such as how use custom WordPress plugins and themes, retrieve data, maintain security, use social media, and modify your blog without changing any core code to more advanced topics like How to design a WordPress theme, how to code a WordPress Plugin and How to do SEO for WordPress.

STARTING OFF WITH WORDPRESS BASICS

I know that many of you are just starting off with WordPress and the following books will surely help you

1) WordPress for Dummies

Are you a wannabe blogger? A seasoned pro migrating your blog to WordPress? Looking to do more cool stuff with your existing WordPress blog? Then this fun guide is for you! WordPress for Dummies is a veritable smorgasbord of WordPress information, ideas, tools, resources, and instruction on everything you need to create and maintain your dream blog. The author explores the differences between hosted accounts on WordPress.com, self-hosted WP blogs, and multi-user blogs, and examines all the basics of plugins, templates, moderating comments and spam, and troubleshooting common problems.

You’ll find out about archiving, interacting with readers through comments, tracking back, and handling spam. You’ll get the scoop on blog theme and presentation by using template tags, set up a MySQL database, explores RSS feeds, and organize a blogroll. It covers Migrating to WP, 10 Great Free Themes, Ten Great Plugins, Using WP as a Content Management System, Understanding Templates and Plug-ins. If you don’t know anything about PHP you’ll painlessly learn the bits that you do need to know for modifying templates.

2) WordPress 2.7 Complete

If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured blog or non-blog web site in no time, this book is for you. It will give you a rapid and straightforward introduction to the rich and powerful features of WordPress and get you up and running with a state-of-the-art blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. It will help you learn everything WordPress has to offer, from the ground up, so you can build your complete web site. You will see many of WorPress’s hidden powers that will help you build a fully functioning web site.

You will be introduced to the main aspects of a blog – users, communities, posts, comments, news feeds – and learn how to manage them using WordPress. You will learn to install WordPress and customize the look-and-feel of your web site. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content, be it text or images, on your blog, and also understand how users interact with the blog. By working through the book you’ll be inspired as well as informed, and have the capability and the ideas to make your blog cutting edge and exciting to maximize its impact.

More advanced users will also pick up tips on creating your own themes and plug-ins, and such technical steps as backing up your WordPress web site and moving it from one server to another.

3) Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read

Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read is the perfect jumping off point for people who want to start blogging (or site-building) with one of the world’s most popular platforms, especially if they have no idea where, or how, to start. To create a blog people want to read – takes thought, planning, and some effort. From picking a theme and using tags to choosing widgets and building a community, creating your blog really starts after you set it up.

In this book you learn how to install and get your WordPress blog running, set up your site to ensure it can easily grow with you and your readers, be the master of user accounts, manage your site with the WordPress Dashboard and extend its capabilities with plug-ins, make the most of images, work with pages, templates, and links, maintain your site and fix common problems.

4) WordPress Complete

WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versality and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

If you want to create powerful, fully-featured blogs in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore WordPress showing you what it offers and how to go about building your blog with the system.

You will be introduced to the main aspects of a blog – users, communities, posts, comments, news feeds – and learn how to manage them using WordPress. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content, be it text or images, on your blog, and also understand how users interact with the blog. In working through the book you’ll be inspired as well as informed, and have the capability and the ideas to make your blog cutting edge and exciting to maximize its impact.

5) Teach Yourself Visually WordPress

Get your blog up and running with WordPress

Are you itching to share your thoughts with the world through blogging but aren’t sure how? Teach Yourself VISUALLY WordPress introduces you to one of the most popular, easy-to-use blogging platforms: WordPress. This book’s clear directions and visual approach helps you to quickly get started in WordPress and then take full advantage of all its features. Janet Majure, an experienced and popular WordPress user, demonstrates key points with examples from her blogs.

• Provides visual step-by-step instructions for creating and setting up a WordPress site
• Explains how to create engaging written and visual content
• Shares advice on customizing sites through use of plug-ins and themes and custom site editing
• Details more advanced procedures for self-hosted bloggers, including buying a domain, getting a Web host, and installing WordPress

The blogosphere beckons! Teach Yourself VISUALLY WordPress Brimming with clear instructions and exciting ideas for building a successful blog on WordPress.

6) Sams Teach Yourself WordPress in 10 Minutes

Sams Teach Yourself WordPress in 10 Minutes offers straightforward, practical answers when you need fast results. By working through quick, 10-minute lessons, you’ll learn everything you need to know to take advantage of the WordPress encyclopedia[md]and all of WordPress’s incredible resources. Coverage includes quickly building blogs for free using WordPress.com; managing blogs from the Dashboard; customizing blogs to fit your message; creating more powerful text and media content; attracting visitors via search engine optimization; moderating comments and building communities; setting up RSS feeds; hosting your own blog with WordPress.org software; earning ad revenue; using analytics to measure blog performance; integrating with Twitter and social networking sites; delivering content via iPhone and BlackBerry; streamlining publishing with third-party tools, and much more. Most of this book’s instruction is presented in easy-to-follow numbered steps, and it’s packed with examples and screenshots to show you what things look like along the way. Tips offer insider advice and shortcuts, and Cautions help you avoid problems. Making the most of WordPress has never been this easy!

7) A Step by Step WordPress Tutorial For Beginners

A Step by Step WordPress Tutorial for Beginners is written for people who want to create a blog with as little technical mumbo jumbo as possible. This book explains WHAT you need to do, WHY you need to do it, and exactly HOW to do it in a thorough, step by step tutorial written in simple English. In this easy to read book, you’ll learn how to create a self-hosted blog, how to install WordPress with just a few clicks of your mouse and how to change the themes and personalize your blog. It demystifies concepts like pinging, trackbacks, widgets and plugins, gravatars and wavatars, RSS and email subscriptions, and it also tells you how to get people to discover your blog, what to do about spam, and more. By using this simple tutorial to create a self-hosted blog with WordPress, you’ll be able to set up your blog in almost no time, with ease and accuracy, and your final result will be a professional looking blog that people will be able to find just minutes after you write your first post!

8 ) WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites (Book & DVD)

A unique introduction to building web sites with WordPress

WordPress is today’s most popular open source blog publishing application, but its powerful features, simple interface, and easy expansion make it a great content management system for all types of web sites. This unique book-and-video package provides you with beginner-friendly tutorials for building and maintaining a WordPress web site. You’ll discover how to customize WordPress to meet your needs and you’ll see how critical—and simple—it is to expand and update content in order to make your site as effective as possible.

• Walks you through installing the software, provides an overview of the administration interface, and covers the basic settings you’ll need to get started
• Examines the ins and outs of uploading images, video, documents, etc., and using them on your site
• Demonstrates how to customize the look of your site using cascading style sheets
• Reviews helpful techniques for optimizing your site and making it search-engine friendly
• Explains how to track your site’s statistics, keep your plugins and themes up to date, and practice smart backup habits
• Addresses installing, activating, and troubleshooting plugins

ADVANCED WORDPRESS

9) Digging Into WordPress

Digging into WordPress will not help you to set up a basic WordPress install with a plugin and a bad looking theme.
Instead, this book focuses on what’s inside WordPress and all the details that will make your blog better, more secure and more powerful.

But does that mean that this book isn’t for beginners? Well, if you’re a total newbie who never installed WordPress it is not the best book to start with. But if you’re a motivated beginner or if you have already some experience with PHP and/or CMS, you’ll definitely enjoy this book.

10) WordPress Bible

WordPress is so flexible that developers are now tapping it to create robust applications for content, contact, and e-mail management. Whether you’re a casual blogger or programming pro, this comprehensive guide covers WordPress from the basics through advanced application development. Learn how to use custom plugins and themes, retrieve data, maintain security, use social media, and modify your blog without changing any core code. You’ll even get to know the ecosystem of products that surrounds this popular, open-source tool.

• Enhance your blog’s findability in the search engines and beyond
• Discover hooks and leverage the WordPress event-driven programming interface
• Create WordPress widgets in only a few minutes
• Explore alternate uses of WordPress
• Enhance your blog with WordPress MU
• Ensure your plugins maintain future compatibility
• Create highly customizable and dynamic themes using template tags
• Learn best security practices as a user and developer

11) Professional WordPress (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Explore the power and possibilities of WordPress from the inside out

As the most popular self-hosted blogging software in use today, WordPress is remarkably simple to operate and can be extended and tailored for a wide variety of applications. This guide focuses on the internal structure and flow of the core code, as well as the data model on which that code operates, so that you can harness the power of WordPress to meet your specific needs. The author team pulls together developer and deployer expertise, as well as knowledge of popular open source plugins, themes, and tools for WordPress, to provide an in-depth guide suitable for all WordPress users, from self-hosted bloggers to enterprise content management system applications.

Professional WordPress:

• Offers an overview of the WordPress system and describes what happens when a WordPress-generated web page is displayed
• Discusses the core of WordPress, describing internal code flow and data structures
• Demonstrates extending WordPress through plugins and customizing it via themes
• Combines a developer view of user experience and optimization with the deployer requirements for performance, security, and measurement

Provides practical examples of integrating WordPress with enterprise and social networking tools

12) WordPress In Depth

Advice and techniques that you need to get the job done.

Looking for ways to streamline your work so you can focus on maximizing your time? In Depth provides specific, tested, and proven solutions to the problems you run into every day–things other books ignore or oversimplify. This is the one book that you can rely on to answer the questions you have now and will have in the future.

In Depth offers

• Comprehensive coverage with detailed solutions
• Breakthrough techniques and shortcuts that are unavailable elsewhere
• Practical, real-world examples with nothing glossed over or left out
• Troubleshooting help for tough problems you can’t fix on your own
• Outstanding authors recognized worldwide for their expertise and teaching style
• Quick information via sidebars, tips, reminders, notes, and warnings

In Depth is the only tool you need to get more done in less time!

Includes coverage on blog creation, widgets, plug-ins, themes, SEO, the WordPress.com platform, and WordPress.org software

13) Smashing WordPress – Beyond The Blog

Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility.

Inside, WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the blog and shows you how WordPress can serve as a CMS, a photo gallery, an e-commerce site, and more.

You will learn:

• The anatomy of a WP install and how WordPress actually works
• How to build beautiful WordPress themes – including child themes
• How to create custom login forms and admin themes
• How to use the loop to control content, and even use alternatives to the loop
• How to integrate theme options
• How to build plugins – including widget functionality
• How to build your WordPress projects for SEO
• Integrate WordPress with the social web
• How to create amazing navigation
• How to use conditional control elements

Smashing Magazine (smashingmagazine.com) is one of the world’s most popular web design sites. True to the Smashing mission, the Smashing Magazine book series delivers useful and innovating information to web designers and developers.

14) WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Are you feeling limited with WordPress, or are you wondering how popular blogs do a certain kind of thing that you can’t? With this cookbook, you will learn many WordPress secrets and techniques, with step-by-step, useful recipes dedicated to achieving a particular goal or solve a particular problem. You’ll learn the secret of expensive premium themes, how to optimize your blog for SEO and online profits, and how to supercharge WordPress with killer functions used by the most popular blogs over the Internet.

What you will learn from this book?

• Use filters to add more features to WordPress without editing any core files
• Easily transform a personal blog to a complete, multi-author online magazine
• Turn any free WordPress theme into a powerful and polished premium theme by changing colors and fonts, inserting your custom logo, and more
• Transform a classic theme into a captivating Photoblog
• Learn how plug-ins and widgets work, and how you can create your own
• Integrate popular services into your blog including Twitter, FeedBurner, Digg, del.icio.us, and many more
• Learn proven techniques to attract more readers and comments
• Incorporate advertisements into your RSS feed
• Tips and tricks to secure your blog and optimize it for SEO

15) WordPress For Business Bloggers

This book will take you beyond the basics of WordPress, helping you take full advantage of its rich and powerful features to transform your basic blog into a more advanced and professional blog as quickly and painlessly as possible. You will learn everything you need to know to extend and grow your business blog. You will learn to mange the content including images and videos, which will make your blog more appealing. You’ll also learn how to market and measure the success of your blog using Google web applications and other popular tools. So, if want to transform your business blog to give a kick start to your business this book is for you.

This book deals with using WordPress and third-party tools to manage and optimize your blog, focusing on the business aspects of blogging. It is not an introduction to WordPress and does not cover the basics such as installation or how to post. Most readers will already have an established WordPress blog or will at least be in the advanced stages of planning one.

What you will learn from this book?

• Develop a `blogging business plan’: clarify your blogging goals and sketch out a process for achieving them in WordPress
• Build a custom theme: so that the look of your blog immediately communicates your brand to visitors
• Engage with the blogosphere: create beneficial relationships with other bloggers, making the most of each other’s traffic and customers
• Optimize your site for search: incorporate good SEO practices into your blog posting and planning
• Use social media marketing such as Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and Del.icio.us to drive traffic to your blog
• Monitor visitors and analyze their activity using WordPress.com stats, Feedburner for your RSS feeds, and Google Analytics
• Manage adverts and implement revenue-generating features using Google AdSense with the Adsense Manager plugin
• Incorporate multimedia on your blog, including video and image galleries

16)  Quick Snap Guide to Photoblogging With WordPress

Photoblogs have become a very important tool for advanced photographers and professionals who want to market their work, as well as a popular forum for casual photographers to share personal photos. “David Busch’s Quick Snap Guide to Photoblogging with WordPress: An Instant Start-Up Manual for Creating and Promoting Your Own Photoblog” is a complete start to-finish guide on how to create a photoblog using WordPress, the most popular blogging software among photographers that allows you to create a blog site for free, hosted on WordPress.com. This guide explains the purpose and function of all the features and capabilities of each WordPress tool, how to use them, and why. Laid out in clear, well-illustrated two- and four-page spreads, each step-by-step explanation includes images that show the results after using each feature. All the basics of creating a WordPress account, setting up your photoblog, uploading your first photos, and sharing them, are presented in an easy to browse format. Perfect for professional photographers, avid amateur shutterbugs, and even non-photography bloggers who want to include photos on their blog sites, “David Busch’s Quick Snap Guide to Photoblogging with WordPress” will help you get up and blogging quickly and easily.

17) WordPress 2.9 Ecommerce

WordPress is easily one of the hottest platforms for building blogs and general web sites. With the addition of the WP e-Commerce plug-in, it’s also a competent platform for easily creating and running an online store, capable of selling physical items as well as services and digital downloads. WordPress with e-Commerce offers every feature that a seller and a customer may need. You can build an online store that makes it easier for the customers to find and buy products.

WordPress 2.8 e-Commerce focuses on the integration of WordPress with the WordPress e-Commerce plug-in, covering all aspects of building and developing an online store from scratch.

This book provides a simple, step-by-step approach to developing an effective online store. It guides you through your initial planning and first steps, plug-in installation and configuration, building your catalog of products to sell, accepting payments for your orders, and dealing with taxes and shipping. You will also learn how to promote and market your new store, handle customer accounts and staff roles, and deal with essential store security.

THEMES DEVELOPMENT

18) How to Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer

Managing web content has always been tricky, but with WordPress, any web designer can have a flexible, free and powerful CMS to use not just on blogging projects, but on all sorts of websites. In How To Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer you will learn step by step how to take a straight HTML site and power it with WordPress.

During the course of the book you’ll build THREE WordPress themes, a blog, a portfolio site and a general site with menus and submenus. Each theme demonstrates different aspects of WordPress theming and all three are packaged in with the book so you’ll have Photoshop, HTML, CSS and WordPress PHP files to refer to. You can take a look at the three sites online here:

• Demo Blog Theme
• Demo Portfolio Theme
• Demo General Site Theme

19) WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Theme design can be approached from two angles. The first is simplicity; sometimes it suits the client and/or the site to go as bare-bones as possible. In that case, it’s quick and easy to take a very basic, pre-made theme and modify it. The second is “Unique and Beautiful”. Occasionally, the site’s theme needs to be created from scratch so that everything displayed caters to the specific kind of content the site offers. This book is going to take you through the Unique and Beautiful route with the idea that once you know how to create a theme from scratch, you’ll be more apt at understanding what to look for in other WordPress themes. This book can be used by WordPress users or visual designers (with no server-side scripting or programming experience) who are used to working with the common industry-standard tools like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver or other popular graphic, HTML, and text editors. Regardless of your web development skill-set or level, you’ll find clear, step-by-step instructions, but familiarity with a broad range of web development skills and WordPress know-how will allow you to gain maximum benefit from this book.

20) WordPress Theme Design

Whether you’re working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site’s design and branding.

What you will learn from this book?

• Set up a basic workflow and development environment for WordPress theme design
• Create detailed designs and code them up
• Enhance your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphics
• Debug and validate your theme using W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation tools
• Customize and tweak your theme’s layout
• Set up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive forms
• Download and install useful plug-ins and widgetize your theme
• Improve post and page content using jQuery and ThickBox
• Add interactivity to your themes using Flash
• Includes a reference guide to WordPress 2.0′s template hierarchy, markup, styles and template tags, as well as include and loop functions

PLUGIN DEVELOPMENT

21) WordPress Plugin Development – Beginner’s Guide

If you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. This book will show you how to build all sorts of WordPress plug-ins: admin plug-ins, Widgets, plug-ins that alter your post output, present custom “views” of your blog, and more.

WordPress Plug-in Development (Beginner’s Guide) focuses on teaching you all aspects of modern WordPress development. The book uses real and published WordPress plug-ins and follows their creation from the idea to the finishing touches, in a series of carefully picked, easy-to-follow tutorials. You will discover how to use the WordPress API in all typical situations, from displaying output on the site in the beginning to turning WordPress into a CMS in the last chapter. In Chapters 2 to 7 you will develop six concrete plug-ins and conquer all aspects of WordPress development.

Each new chapter and each new plug-in introduces different features of WordPress and how to put them to good use, allowing you to gradually advance your knowledge. This book is written as a guide to take your WordPress skills from the very beginning to the level where you are able to completely understand how WordPress works and how you can use it to your advantage.

BUDDYPRESS AND WORDPRESS MU

22) WordPress MU 2.8 – A Beginner’s Guide

WordPress MU enables you to build a complete, professional blog network. Each user gets their own blog, and can choose their favorite templates and plug-ins, and develop their own content. WordPress MU powers some of the largest blog networks in the world, including the mighty WordPress.com – home to thousands of bloggers.

This book will take you through the setup of a WordPress MU-powered blogging network, using a real, working blog network as an example, so that you can follow the creation process step-by-step. Your blogging network will be complete with professional features such as friends lists, status feeds, groups, forums, photo galleries, and more, to build your own WordPress.com – a place where users can quickly come and create a blog for themselves.

The book starts with a clean install of WordPress MU, and as you work through the book, you will build the blog network, and add on more and more features, all seamlessly integrated to achieve a professional, custom-built look.

You will find new themes and plug-ins added to the site, as well as customization of the WordPress multi-user code. The book will also look at ways you can manage your community, and keep your site safe and secure, ensuring that it is a spam-free, enjoyable community for your users. In the later chapters, you will add a forum using the bbPress script, and add BuddyPress social networking components to your site.

23) Buddypress for Dummies

Got a cause, a hobby, or some other obsession you can’t wait to share with a like-minded community? BuddyPress is the buddy you need to get that community started. Here’s how to get BuddyPress up and running on your WordPress Web site and use its free tools and themes to host a social network devoted to your pet projects, right on your site.

• Full court press — start by obtaining a Web hosting provider and installing WordPress, then install and configure BuddyPress
• It’s your domain — register your domain name and use FTP to transfer necessary files
• Member options — explore BuddyPress features for creating profiles, avatars, and community friendships
• Growing with the group — integrate members’ blogs, set up member groups, and add discussion forums with BuddyPress
• Custom Buddy — expand BuddyPress themes, personalize them with CSS, and learn how to create your own
• It’s on the wire — promote community interaction through wire postings for individuals or groups
• Gather the gang — integrate Twitter®, Facebook®, Flickr®, YouTube®, and other social media into your community
• Go farther — discover third-party plugins that add more options

BLOGGING

24) ProBlogger – Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

A complete how-to from two of the world’s top bloggers

Thousands of aspiring bloggers launch new blogs every day, hoping to boost their income. Without solid advice from experts, most will fail. This bestselling guide, now fully revised with new and updated tips and tricks from two of the world’s most successful bloggers, provides the step-by-step information bloggers need to turn their hobby into an income source or a fulltime career.

• Earning a solid income from blogging is possible, but tricky; this book details proven techniques and gives aspiring bloggers the tools to succeed
• Even novices will learn to choose a blog topic, analyze the market, set up a blog, promote it, and earn revenue
• Offers solid, step-by-step instruction on how bloggers make money, why niches matter, how to use essential blogging tools and take advantage of social media and content aggregators, what a successful blog post should include, how to optimize advertising, and much more

Written by two fulltime professional bloggers, the updated edition of ProBlogger tells you exactly how to launch and maintain a blog that makes money.

25) Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging like a Pro

Want a personal or business blog of your own? It’s easy! In this simple guide, one of the world’s most experienced bloggers walks you through every step, from getting started to building a worldwide audience. Tris Hussey covers it all, from low-cost blogging tools to high-powered writing tips! Get this book, and get started fast–with a professional-quality blog that meets your goals,whatever they are!

Learn from a pro! Discover tips, tricks, and great solutions for:

• Setting up your blog the right way–in just minutes!
• Writing blog entries people want to read
• Handling comments–even nasty ones!
• Creating a conversation and building a community
• Publicizing your blog
• Choosing the right free or low-cost blogging tools
• Avoiding beginner mistakes
• Earning cash from your blog!

So which is your favourite WordPress book and Why? I am sure you are going to share it with us.

Tags: Books

Category: Reviews