I'm a confident user of wordpress, having installed my own premium theme and customized it using google and online tutorials. I'm nervous but comfortable tinkering with my site. I hoped this book might give me some deeper understanding of some simple php or css things I could do to personalize my blog more or just understand it better and use it with more confidence. I'd definitely like to upload my own audio files and understand my options for video in greater depth, too.



But this book did not go "in depth" as the title suggests. They do give some instructions for doing some simple things, but they waste a good portion of the book on inserting images or what each of the things in the kitchen sink does, which is not necessary for most users - if you've used Word before, you can figure out the kitchen sink with little effort. I didn't really get any helpful explanations of how to do the in-depth things that I want to do.



I also hoped for more tips on how to make wordpress more secure (since I got hacked a few months back even with a premium theme), but they didn't even cover the basics of security that I could find, instead telling us to go to a blog post online at someone else's site.



I thought when ordering this book that if it was too basic for me, that I could send it to my Dad, who is a newbie at wordpress and has his own fresh new blog. But because the authors switch back and forth from wp.com and [...], I could just imagine the phone calls between me and my Dad, with him insisting that he knows how to do something and can I tell him why it isn't working the way it's pictured, and me telling him - you have a [...] site, please make sure you're following the [...] directions. The layout of trying to show folks how to install themes or do things from both types of site was just confusing. Plus the text is so small that I can imagine my sixty year old Dad digging out his magnifying glass to read the darn thing.



I can't tell who would like this book. They just tried to do WAY too much and in the end it just didn't function for any type of user, as far as I can tell. You might feel differently. But I'll just continue with my usual strategy of googling for online tutorials when I want to do something on WP. The authors don't provide anything not readily available online with color photos, video, and large print (all lacking in this book).