I had my first sneak preview of this book at WordCamp in Birmingham last year, and was pretty excited to see the nice people at Packt putting out books specifically about WordPress. I've yet to read the rest of the series, but I must say I'm disappointed in the Theme Design offering.

When a book has a title like WordPress Theme Design, you expect its remit to be pretty specific: it should be about WordPress themes. Somewhere in this book there are a few useful tips on WordPress design, but largely, they're hidden under a lot of waffle and off-topic material which is better-covered elsewhere: much of it is, unfortunately, just another design book, and not a great one at that.

Chapter one, for example, begins with what you'll need. A browser, you say? I would never have guessed. Chapter two covers the author's personal design process, with particular reference to drawing a sketch of how you want the site to look first. If you've ever designed a website, you won't need this.

By chapter three, thank goodness, we finally get to a bit of WordPress: "Coding it up". This is a walkthrough of creating a theme, and could be helpful to someone who'd never done it before and who was incapable of taking a look at Kubrick or WordPress Classic and seeing how they work. Together with chapter six's WP theme tags reference, we have the beginnings of something useful, but it's surrounded by an entire chapter on debugging, which is hardly specific to WordPress, and another two largely concerned with the author's dislike of dropdown menus and AJAX for forms.

I'm failing to see, really, who this book is aimed at. It clearly assumes basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP and javascript, so it's not for total beginners. And yet vast chunks of it are far too basic to be aimed at experienced designers wanting to learn about techniques specific to WordPress. Crucial WP features like hooks and filters are omitted altogether. There is not one mention anywhere of even wp_head or wp_footer, so anyone producing themes according to this book is going to find lots of plugins will not work with them. And the exhortation to "read the Codex" for more advanced use of theme tags seems to undermine the whole purpose of the book.

At just 211 pages, this is a thin book. Add to that Ms Silver's waffley style, a fair amount of white space and several chapters that have almost nothing to do with WordPress, and the £24.99 cover price seems excessive (though I got mine for a more reasonable £12-ish on eBay). I'd cheerfully pay twenty-five quid for a book that helped me to write better WordPress themes, but I'm sorry to say that this is not that book.

Tags: books

Posted by Sue on July 21, 2009 in WordPress.