It is pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the growing prevalence of mobile technologies is something that cannot be ignored. A special report in the Economist on telecoms in emerging markets wrapped up with the prediction, “…at current rates of growth it seems likely that within five years, and certainly within ten, everyone in the world who wants a mobile phone will probably have one. 3G networks capable of broadband speeds will be widespread even in developing countries, and even faster 4G networks will be spreading rapidly in some places.” It does not appear that it will be long before Smart Phones are just normal phones and anyone who wants to be, will be connected to a world wide mobile network. Any business or developer that wants to reach groups of significant size really needs to be prepared via mobile platforms. Brian Fling has been helping others operate in this space for close to a decade and is very familiar with the lay of the land. He sees the opportunities and has experienced the pitfalls and frustrations as well. His new book, Mobile Design and Development brings some of that experience and knowledge to the mobile neophyte, looking for an overview of just how to get in the game.

Mobile Design and Development is not a long book and doesn’t delve deeply into the specifics of any one platform or technology. This is an overview that would be of value to anyone that will be managing a project being built for mobile, or for technical folks that are new to mobile. This will give the manager and leader an appreciation for the challenges and good guidance on realistic scope. For the person actually implementing the technology there is quite a bit of good information here that will be of value on the front end for making choices in direction and platform. There is also a section on building iPhone web apps ( applicable to any phone with similar capabilities running a WebKit based browser ). But this is not primarily a ‘how to code’ or reference book for any one mobile technology. This isn’t going to be the only resource a developer will want but could prove invaluable in saving time and effort wandering in what can be a rather complicated set of choices. The book even deals with making money on mobile platforms and so Fling very succinctly gives great coverage to most all that one would need to get up and running. I would think the audience that would get the most from Mobile Design and Development is the small team or individual that want to take a stab at the mobile market and have a high degree of flexibility and freedom. This book would be an invaluable resource in sorting through all the possibilities. Whereas someone working in a large corporation that wont give them the freedom to choose their platform, or someone who has already made all their platform choices would probably do well just to dig into something more specific to their chosen technology. That said, if the choice was arbitrary and if isn’t too late to change, working through the first half of this book may give one solid reason to reconsider.

In his preface Fling states that he has three principles that he would like to impart.

• You need to know the different facets of the mobile medium.
• You need to know how to leverage mobile technologies to address context.
• You need to know how to leverage the right mobile technology for the need.

The book is in two sections, the first being an overview of just all what falls under the “mobile” umbrella and provides a few ways of organizing those pieces. It works to provide information applicable to the first two principles. The second section of the book focuses on the third principle and goes mostly deeply into mobile web applications, which Fling sees as the answer to the platform and carrier fragmentation present in other solutions. The question of web apps vs Native apps has created some interesting discussion and Fling falls into the ‘leaning towards web apps’ camp, though he is pragmatic throughout this book.

That pragmatism is extremely attractive and a large part of what makes this book worthwhile. It is obvious while reading that Fling doesn’t just talk about how things should be done, but he follows his own advice in his writing and presents what he believes will make for the best solutions. If there is a place where idealism will lead to the quick and ugly death of an idea it would be the mobile space. Compromise isn’t just something that may make sense at times, it is often forced right into the platform by carriers or others. Fling doesn’t back away from this and acknowledges when there are multiple routes, none standing out as ideal. He is very up front in sections where his technical reviewers had other opinions and presenting other options that they felt might be better. Fling tries to give succinct coverage to what he sees as the better possible options and leaves the choices to the reader, now armed with enough information to dig deeper.

Fling’s clarity and up front appraisal of the considerations in the mobile space lead to him describing one of the most prominent limitations of his own book. Besides the obvious that it can’t go into great depth on every mobile technology there is the fact that this information has a limited shelf life. In the fifth chapter, Developing a Mobile Strategy, Fling gives a set of seven rules that he believes should be followed in the process of creating a strategy. The second rule is, Believe What You See, Not What You Read and the following chapter contains the admonition, “Don’t trust any report, fact, or figure that is more than a year or two old. It is most likely wrong. For example, the majority of assumptions about mobile development pre-iPhone are no longer applicable.” According to Fling, barring a revision this book has a shelf life of roughly a year or two. After that one should really be looking to more recent resources. On the other hand, anyone even thinking about jumping into the fray, should be reading this right now.

This limitation is the only thing that causes me to not rate the book as a ‘classic’ and it is not really the fault of the author. It is just a reflection of the rapid rate of change taking place in the world it describes. My only other problem with the book is small, though at times a bit annoying. The book is black and white, without any color illustrations. This in itself isn’t a problem but the shades chosen for pie charts in more than one place are not sufficiently different to tell where one edge stops and another starts. Fling describes the charts, they are never floating alone without text that addresses them, so the reader doesn’t lose information, just the opportunity to see it displayed in a visual format. I’m not a person with great visual design skills, so if I noticed I’m sure others involved in the production of the book have as well and hopefully later printings corrected this issue.

The first section, as I’ve described, is a high level overview of the mobile world. This covers what Fling thinks of as all the layers of the mobile ecosystem. This means everything from carriers to hardware manufacturers to operating systems and more. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last year reading up on much of what Fling covers here, but there were still pieces of new information that I found. Fling takes a global view and doesn’t lean towards the situation as it is presented in any single geographical area. He is also dealing with all types of phones and platforms. While he obviously spends a lot of time, especially in the second section, dealing with more capable smart phones, he is still dealing throughout the book with less capable devices and systems. This is where Fling’s experience really shines. He has navigated what it means to try and develop for less capable phones, the realistic challenges one faces trying to get onto more hardware and more networks. It is at times daunting, but I for one would rather walk into something knowing the reality rather than being uninformed.

Fling hits all the highlights from what is available to suggestions on the whole life cycle of a mobile product including prototyping, testing and adapting to various types of phones and platforms. The second section, dealing with more specifics on putting together a Web App will throw a bone to the developer that wants to see some code. While it is mostly mark-up Fling does spend time dealing with some specifics of implementing a WebKit compatible solution. He states that this will work on a few modern phones, though a few subsections do carry warnings that they are iPhone specific. Fling covers the use of XHTML, XHTML-MP, CSS, JavaScript, and other applicable web technology. This is probably where the management types will start to skim over things. I do think though it still serves the purpose of giving an idea of what is possible and when it is appropriate to choose a pure web application over a native application.

I think that Fling does an excellent job showing that it is important to create mobile applications that are designed purely with mobile users in mind. The last chapter is only a couple pages long and is the only place that Fling devotes purely to prognosticating. The rest of the book is practical and focused purely on what will work right now. In his closing thoughts, Fling essentially invites the reader to be a part of bringing about the future of mobile. I think this is very fitting as he has just given his readers what they need to set out on that path.

Title: Mobile Design and Development
Author: Brian Fling
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Pages: 328
ISBN: 978-0-596-15544-5
Rating: 9/10
Tagline: Practical techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps.

Web applications are all the rage. Web applications that function within the context of social networking sites doubly so. I think it is safe to say that pretty much anyone looking to garner a large audience on the web, for financial or any other reasons, has to be considering how they can reach people on sites like Facebook, or all those users out there accessing the web via their iPhones. Sun Microsystems has entered this arena by providing a set of web based development tools and a platform on which to host the resulting products that is now in beta and named Zembly. And while Zembly has not been open to the public for all that long, two of Zemblys architects with the help of two writers have published a new cookbook for the aspiring Zembly developer, Assemble the Social Web with Zembly.

Zembly is relatively new and the name doesn’t offer any insight into just what it is, so before I get to the book itself, I’ll explain a little about just what Zembly is. It is a Sun project. In their promotional material on the site they claim, “Over two decades ago, Sun’s motto, ‘The Network is the Computer’, foreshadowed the advent of today’s cloud computing movement.We like to say that zembly is the development environment for Sun’s bold vision…” So Zembly is an on-line development environment. But more than just being an on-line editor, it is development in a social context aimed at social tools. The code written by one Zembly user, is available to any other user.

Along with providing a social development environment, Zembly also provides the platform and resources where the applications developed there will live. To put it in literal terms the framework is comprised of Solaris, Java, Glassfish, and MySQL. It operates via Sun’s Network.com cloud-computing business. That framework supports the use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, FBML, and FBJS. There are templates in place to develop applications for several popular social networking sites and there will be more as users add them.

Assemble the Social Web with Zembly is an introduction to all this and serves primarily as a cookbook to help the reader get their head around how all the pieces work together, giving them a jump start into the process. As Zembly is all about colaberation it seems appropriate that this book is the product of four authors. Gail Anderson and Paul Anderson are experience authors, with a number of published tech books between them. Todd Fast is the architect and CTO of Zembly. Chris Webster is another Sun employee and the Technical lead for Zembly and also a published author himself.

The book covers an overview of Zembly, a chapter on how to use the tool set and then moves through a series of chapters that provide examples of building widgets and services for Flickr, Zillow, Facebook, Dapper, and web apps for the iPhone. There is also a widget section that makes use of WeatherBug, Google Maps and Yahoo! Pipes. The results can be published as applications within those sites or embedded into other sites. I see the real potential for Zembly in places like Dapper and Pipes, where Zembly becomes an endpoint for those types of services that can consume almost anything. The usefulness of Zembly comes in allowing to integrate that into the social sites and the scaleable hosting is already built right in.

The book is well organized and black & white illustrations are put to good use in making directions clear. The index is thorough. The authors do not assume a lot of prior knowledge on the part of the reader in regard to how the various social networks operate. This did mean at times I had to plow explanations of things that really didn’t have anything to do with Zembly. The information on what Facebook applications are and what they do is a good example. This was a little annoying but fortunately these sections were short. I found the writing to be clear and to the point. The authors do not try to be hip or cool and focus on content.

To really get the most out of the book a reader should be familiar with JavaScript, html and css. It wouldn’t hurt to also understand RESTful web services. Once the first two chapters explaining Zembly are over, this really is a cook-book, or set of examples/tutorials rather than instruction on how to code or do markup. The experienced developer could probably slide by even if they were not working regularly with these technologies. Someone who has never written a bit of code may want to spend some time building some familiarity with javascript before they tack this book. Zembly itself has some quick tutorials that require almost no knowledge of programming. I watched a graphic art guy at work throw together a facebook widget/app in about 10 minutes using Zembly.

Zembly is still in what has become the ubiquitous beta state for on-line applications. And as it is under active development this book probably has a very short shelf-life. It wont be all that long before the platform moves along and leaves it behind. In an effort to shore up against that inevitability all the code and resources for the book are stored in Zembly. If changes are made today, tomorrows reader will be able to work with the updated structures. The book itself is also available in traditonal ebook formats and through Safari.

One of the nicer things about the Zembly approach is that it removes the barrier of hosting costs to participate in this space. In turn the developer surrenders up their work to be used by others. This may be problematic for those who would rather keep all their code to themselves, but fits in-line nicely with the fact that the entire stack is built on FOSS products. Of course, once again the beta status means that this free ride is not something that is guaranteed for perpetuity. I’m guessing that at some point, this type of central hosting is going to necessitate an attempt by Sun to generate some income from the service.

Getting in on the front end of a technology can often be rather difficult. The Sun folks seem to be ahead of the curve on making it easier for people to participate with Zembly. There are excellent tutorials and documentation on the site itself. For those who want to take it a step further, there is this book with a wealth of examples and explanations that will really accelerate the learning process. I’m not sure if Zembly will become the next big thing or not, but anyone who wants to gamble that it will, here is a chance to make the most of the ride.

Title: Assemble the Social Web with Zembly
Author: Gail Anderson and Paul Anderson with Todd Fast and Chris Webster
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Pages: 385
ISBN: 978-0-13-714431-0
Rating: 8/10
Tagline: Let’s Make a Social Application. Right Here. Right Now. Together.

I vividly remember the first time I was able to dial up a bbs with my Commodore Vic-20. It was Star Trek themed and I was excited to see that the Sysop was online. We typed a few lines of text back and forth while I hollered to everyone in the house that I was talking to someone through the computer. Things have come a long way since then and I’ve put in quite a few hours experiencing one of the more exciting sides of the internet, participating in community. Of course it hasn’t all been great. Communities on-line are just like any other in that there are differences of opinion and issues that arise. Some are handled well, some are not. Social interaction can be very complicated and learning how to manage a social site can be a process that involves a lot of painful lessons. Fortunately not all of our learning has to come through direct experience. Sometimes we have the opportunity to learn from the experience of others. Patrick O’Keefes book Managing Online Forums is that guide to the budding leader of the webs next great community.

Since the reader will be relying on O’Keefes experience and opinions, his personal history in the subject at hand is extremely relevant. He has been involved in web site design since 1998 and managing online communities since 2000. As the founder and owner of the iFroggy Network he has extensive experience in managing site policy, staff and members. O’Keefe is also active in other communities including his role as a moderator for Sitepoint. Patrick has also published articles there on forum management.

The book’s byline is that it provides everything that you need to know to run a successful community discussion board. There is a wide range of topics covered though the emphasis is primarily placed on what I would call the soft side of community management. The technical discussion is limited, though it is there. There is no real discussion of how to go about setting up software. There are some suggestions as to choosing a domain name and software. Two options are given for software, vBulletin and phpBB. Each is described in a summary consisting of a few paragraphs of basic information. There is little discussion of installation from a technical standpoint. The most technical information deals with the core issues of security and backing up data. I didn’t see this as a real weakness as there is already plenty of documentation on these choices and many more. Adding it all in would have really bulked up the book while distracting from the primary mission which is informing the reader on building successful communities.

While there is not much technical detail, there is discussion of features from a social perspective. O’Keefe doesn’t discuss whether or not a feature should be used because performance or storage ramification but rather focuses on the positives or negatives in terms of managing how participants might view or use those options. This is the information that is not already out there in multiple places. O’Keefe is able to discuss from experience how he has seen users react to these features in the past as well as warning of any possible benefits or pitfalls. This is of course his opinion on these matters. This fact about the nature of the book is going to make or break it for the reader.

I envision that someone would come to this book from three possible positions. They may already have a strong opinion of the issues presented and disagree with the author. On the other hand they may agree. The last group would be people who come without strong presuppositions. I think that the first group would not enjoy the book, there is no objective evidence or argument that will bring these people over. This is after all, subjective opinion. The other two groups I think have a lot to gain, the third group most of all. A person who comes to the material with an open mind, looking for options and guidance will I gain a strong preparation for dealing with a number of issues that are almost certain to arise in online groups.

The book begins by quickly reviewing a set of basic questions that should be asked before a site is set up for a new community. They are fundamental but important and I think it is surprising how many endeavors to build communities don’t seem to have considered them. The are, “What will your community cover?”, “Whom do you want to attract?”, “What will the benefits of your community be?”, and “How will you support the community financially?”. All of these questions, the naming of the community and site, hosting and software are covered up front.

In each of the following major sections, the author’s advice is accompanied by example templates and policies. In chapter three, “Developing Guidelines”, the community guidelines for KarateForums.com and SitePoint.com are printed. There are excellent documents in the chapter on managing staff that give good examples of staff guidelines that can be used in those communities that grow and the work of management needs to be shared. All of these are built on real policies and guidelines. The staff section also includes a nice decision matrix for various situations that may arise, such as hot linking or cross posting.

The chapter “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos” is of course full of interesting examples and history. It is also very valuable. The fact is any successful community will need to deal with adverse conditions and this is where inexperience can be the most costly. O’Keefe outlines likely scenarios and how to handle them. He also gives further examples of guidelines that can help the administrator in staying above the fray and maintaining their sanity when things can be very contentious. From the personal anecdotes, O’Keefe has already been through much of the worse that the web has to offer. This chapter and all that it entails is balance by a chapter on creating a good and healthy environment as well as the importance of keeping things interesting.

Two other chapters deal with what I think of as the business side of running forums. There is a chapter on developing traffic. I was glad to see that this included not only what to do but also what not to do. And there are similar warning within methods that can be used in a positive way or a negative way. O’Keefe cautions against activities that may bring what appear to be short term gains but do not really build sustainable community. While physically separate in the book, I found that this section dovetailed with the chapter on generating income. O’Keefe basically runs down all the various methods for making money with a site. Once again he give the pros and cons as well as strong warnings against the things that are going to be counter productive.

There are three appendices. The first is a list of resources, the second is a set of blank templates that match the examples given in the body of the book and the third is a glossary. I think that glossary is an important because I believe that this book would be an excellent guide to anyone who wants to not only form an online community but is new to the whole idea. These folks may be very caught off guard by the things they will probably need to deal with, beyond the technical issues of getting a site up and running. This book would probably be something that anyone out there setting up sites for others could quickly recommend to help the new manager to be be successful once the site is up and live.

I think there is a lot here also for those with some experience on-line if they don’t have a lot of experience running a community site or if they are just looking for some new ideas. I’ve been corresponding with others electronically for quite a while and I still found quite a bit here that was of value. There is also the strength of going in with policies and actions that are built to head off problems rather than respond to them once they have taken place. I would think this gives any new community a much higher chance of growing and thriving. Managing Online Forums is unique in this regard, to my knowledge. Taking on the human side of managing a site rather than just the technical components.

Title: Managing Online Forums
Author: Patrick O’Keefe
Publisher: AMACOM
Pages: 312
ISBN: 978-0-8144-0197-2
Rating: 9/10
Tagline: Everything you need to know to create and run successful community discussion boards.

Facebook became the largest worldwide social site in the middle of last year. If their current pace holds they will pass MySpace as number one in the U.S. some time next year. Those numbers have led a number of people to strike out and develop Facebook applications, hoping to grab a piece of that huge audience. One aspect of writing such applications is knowing Facebook Markup Language, which has been described as the icing on the Facebook API cake. FBML Essentials aims to be the resource that provides hopeful app writers with what they need to use FBML successfully.

FBML Essentials is a slim little volume in the world of massive technical books. The author, Jesse Stay has accomplished something many projects and authors can’t seem to avoid, scope creep. This little book stays right on target providing FBML documentation with a few extras as book-ends.

The reference portion of the book, as I said, is the bulk of this guide. This section does provide more thorough information than what one would find at the FBML tag section of the Facebook developer wiki. (Which sometimes holds contradicting information for the use of some tags.) There is not only a brief explanation and example but more detailed coverage of options and ramifications. Tags are also grouped in a way that takes into account functionality and what a developer may want to do. This means that while it might not be a thrilling way to go about it, one could read through the reference material in a topical matter while learning how to use FBML in applications.

The first two chapters, before the reference section begins, introduce Facebook applications, walk the reader through prerequisites for development and html considerations within the Facebook environment. This book assumes a solid understanding of markup and specifically html. There is an extremely brief treatment of hosting and general architecture of the Facebook platform.

The last chapter after the reference is a quick introduction to Facebook Java Script. FBJS is a limited form of javascript and Stay does not spend much time with it. There is a quick list of methods, listeners and dialogs with a small amount of illustration on how they might be used as a whole. There are not examples given for each.

There isn’t a whole lot here and that ought to be encouraging to anyone who would want to write a Facebook application but doesn’t want to invest a huge amount of time. Stay gives an example of building a simple application using nothing more than FBML. It’s nice to know that such simple functionality can provide one with an entre into a huge community of potential users. I am also glad that Stay was able to resist the urge to start pulling in every possible aspect of development for Facebook. Instead of a bloated guide the result is a compact and efficient guide to FBML, keeping costs down and avoiding wasted time trying to find what the reader needs.

The index is solid and I highly recommend this handy reference to anyone doing Facebook application development.

Title: FBML Essentials
Author: Jesse Stay
Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Pages: 185
ISBN: 978-0-596-51918-6
Rating: 8/10
Tagline: Facebook Markup Language Fundamentals

I’m very excited about Drupal and all this capability so I immediately got ahold of Matt Butcher’s “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development” as soon as it was available. I am quickly becoming a fan of Packt Publishing for a number of reasons. First is that they are incredibly quick at getting books on the latest and greatest to print. On top of that, they are doing a fantastic job of finding people who are right in the middle of the mix to do the writing. And finally, Packt gives back to the community. When a reader buys a Packt book that covers some open source technology, Packt donates part of the procedes to that project. In this instance, buying “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development” is not only a method for learning more about Drupal, it’s a way of contributing hard, cold cash to Drupal.

Matt Butcher is a consultant that does a lot of work with Drupal and so sitting down with Learning Drupal is a lot like getting Matt to sit down beside you and start working through module development. The book is pretty thourough and fills in a number of unfortunate gaps in existing documentation. I think it is safe to say that one needs to bring a knowledge of PHP, MySQL and such to the table – but Matt will provide everything needed as far as Drupal is concerened. (The homepage for his consulting company is a great Drupal resource in its own right.)

This isn’t a large book, especially by tech book standards, and so not everything is covered to great depth. But the approach is very hands on and focuses on getting things done and working. The fundamentals of how Drupal itself works and its own core modules are explained and any Drupal will be better off for the information. I like to think of this as a tremendous jump start for the aspiring Drupal module developer that will save a lot of time spent wading through the basics of getting started. This allows one to focus much more on the fun challenges and developing that potential great idea.

The second chapter is freely available to download in pdf format. This chapter is representative of the rest of the book and should give the reader an excellent opportunity to judge if the book is for them, if you don’t want to just take my word for it.

I’m continually more and more impressed with Drupal. For anyone who isn’t satisfied to sit on the side lines and watch it motor along, “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development” is the ticket to getting on board and having a part in driving the train.

Another review of this book made the front page of slashdot a bit back – and is the way of Mr. Ross – it offers up some excellent detail. A review over at Drupalib also offers up some nice insight and recomendations.

Title: Learning Drupal 6 Module Development
Author: Matt Butcher
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Pages: 315
ISBN: 978-1-847194-44-2
Rating: 8/10
Tagline: A practical tutorial for creating your first Drupal 6 modules with PHP.

The first two chapters cover introductory material, discussing just what CSS is, what it does, and syntax/nomenclature issues. After that, every chapter is reference material, until chapter 16. The last three chapters cover vendor specific properties, various hacks and work-arounds as well as the difference between html and xhtml. Those five chapters are presented more as straight out prose compared to the reference chapters between, though they still use extensive highlighting and background colors to divide and organize content.

The reference chapters are extremely well laid out. A command, property or other item is in bold at the beginning. Below it, highlighted in grey are various arguments that can be used with that item. An example will be given in a colored box. There are two grids. One covers three aspects of the spec for this item; if it is inherited, the initial value and the css version of the item. There is also a list of browser support for the item in IE6+, FF1+, Saf1.3+ and Op9.2+. The second grid shows compatibility for three versions of Internet Explorer (5.5, 6.0 and 7.0), three versions of Firefox (1.0, 1.5 and 2.0), three versions of Safari (1.3, 2.0 and 3.0) and Opera 9.2. When appropriate there is also a discussion of or list of appropriate values and discussion of usage.

At the end of the book is a single appendix which contains an alphabetical index of properties. There is no proper index for the full book, which is not as bad as it could have been, without the other tools, but is still disappointing.

The typography is clear. The book is concise and clear with little wasted space or verbiage. The color scheme for highlighting the various sections is extremely easy to read and pleasant.

There is one more feature of the book that, aside from content, makes it very useful. There is an online edition of The Ultimate CSS Reference and as far as I can tell, it is completely open to use by anyone without any kinds of restrictions. I couldn’t find any in my copy of the book, I didn’t have to sign up for anything to use the site. This really makes up for the lack of an index as the entire book is searchable from the site. For me, it is the best of both worlds. I have the dead-tree version on my shelf, ready to pull down and satisfy my curiosity. I have the electronic version freely available on the web site, should I need it. The site has the added bonus of including an area for comments on the contents of the book, and there are already some helpful comments and tips there.

I think then, it is safe to say that mechanically this is a more than acceptable reference. The other important piece aside from it being usable, is the quality of the information itself. Good information is useless if one cannot get to it, and a great access system is useless if the information is no good.

The authors, O’Brien and Olsson are themselves extremely experienced in the field and I think it is safe to say they are experts in regards to CSS. The book also had two experienced “Expert Reviewers” in Natalie Downe and Roger Johansson. I couldn’t find any problems with the content, and I think that it is safe to say that these four, along with others have done due diligence to provide an accurate guide to CSS.

Is this the ultimate CSS reference? I haven’t read the others, and ultimate seems to imply comparison to me. So while it might not be the ultimate, I do feel comfortable recommending it to anyone who needs an extremely usable, accurate reference to CSS. I would even recommend it to a beginner who wants to learn CSS, though they should probably augment this book with something aimed at teaching CSS, not just providing a reference.

Title: The Ultimate CSS Reference
Author: Tommy Olsson & Paul O’Brien
Publisher: SitePoint
Pages: 420
ISBN: 0980285852
Rating: 9/10
Tagline: All the CSS knowledge you’ll ever need.

I’ve been using WordPress blogging software for about four years now. I started messing around with themes pretty early on in the process. My approach has not really changed too much over that time span. I start by going on-line and just browsing through themes that are available to down-load and use. There are tons of them available and usually I’ll hit more than one that looks pretty good. I download it, and then I start messing with it, making changes so that it perfectly fits what I want. I am not really inclined to learn all about CSS, PHP or exactly how WordPress works. I just change, save and refresh and usually I eventually get where I want to go. But now, those days are over. Tessa Blakely Silver’s new book “WordPress Theme Design” has made it possible for me to quickly learn the basics, without getting bogged down in minutiae and tons of documentation. This has been a real life-saver for someone who just wants to knock out a nice WordPress theme. I do have to admit though, I’ve learned a number of things about web design that relate to quite a bit more than just WordPress.

This book is not a definitive guide to anything. It will not tell the reader all there is to know about WordPress, CSS or the myriad of other issues that it touches upon. It hits upon most everything that is absolutely necessary to know and there were quite a few bonus areas covered that I didn’t expect. At 211 pages, it is a pretty quick read. The conversational style also makes it go by pretty quickly. The only thing that will slow a reader down, is if they take the time to work alongside the author and follow the examples, and build a theme themselves as they read the book.

In fact reading this book could be summed up this way; it felt like Silver had dropped by and offered to sit with me at my laptop, talking me through how to build a theme for WordPress. The book is logically laid out, but the text just flows, and related topics just come and go as the specific task at hand is addressed. I really enjoyed that and it made the book so much more useful to me than a dry recounting of API’s and CSS parameters. Silver steps way past a step by step how-to and adds much of her experience and opinion. That’s the kind of thing that makes this book worth having, as opposed to just going through on-line documentation.

A couple great examples of the little extras are a nice discussion of font usage and a list of some of the more common fonts and how they might best be employed. The chapter on packaging and distributing a theme has a short, but informative section on licensing and gives a few choices. In both instances Silver is not afraid to voice her preferences, but also informs the reader of other options, as well as pointing to good resources for more information.

Since the book is not exhaustive, there are a lot of these pointers to other sources of information. I found these to be of value as well. I didn’t feel like the book ever got bogged down in minutiae, but if I wanted to dig deeper on something, there was almost always a url pointing to just where I could do so.

The first five chapters give a quick guide to designing and coding a WordPress theme. There are a lot of extras there on design methods, debugging, and implementation tools that will really come in handy for anyone doing web development with xhtml and css. Silver advocates using tools that are available freely, for the most part, and the primary tool for the bulk of the book is the Firefox web browser and a few developer plugins. She does use Photoshop as her image editor, but I had no trouble following along using the Gimp myself. By the time I had completed those chapters I felt like I knew quite a bit more about WordPress and the technologies that it relies upon. I’m not an expert by any stretch, but I’m not just grasping around in the dark any more either.

Chapters 6 through 8 deal with a lot of what one might call ‘flashy’ options for a blog. Silver covers things like using Ajax, embedding flash, dynamic menus and other interactive options. Once again I learned a bit about these in general, and the basics that I needed to know to get them to work with WordPress without too much hassle. There is a short WordPress reference in chapter 6 that covers the most important functions for a theme designer. Chapter 9 closes out the book with a nice review and some good advice that would work for any design whether it is in WordPress or not. I was happy to see the author constantly reminding the reader to consider standards, accessibility and performance. Too many sites seem to have completely forgotten any of those three in pursuit of some certain ‘look’.

I’d say that this book is going to do well with anyone who is comfortable getting in and messing around with mark-up. It will most likely be a bit basic for anyone who is a web design expert. Though if they are coming to WordPress for the first time, this may be just enough to jump-start the learning curve for the WordPress side of things. Someone who doesn’t know what FTP or CSS is, will have a difficult time with this material, though it might be a decent place to branch out from in order to learn. I doubt anyone with a lot of experience creating WordPress themes will find much of anything here that is going to make it worth their time.

As I mentioned, the tone is extremely conversational and casual. The text is well laid out and easy to read. Illustrations are there to aid in understanding, as many of the issues are visual in nature. All the code and files that go along with the text are available for download from the book’s web page. The index is a bit light but acceptable. The table of contents breaks things down to a rather deep level and helps make up for the lack of information in the index. If the index were as good as the table of contents it would be excellent.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn how to better create and alter WordPress themes. This may be the quickest path to learning what needs to be known to create them. Mastering all that is possible with the platform will take much more time and many more resources, this is not everything to everyone, but a great resource for getting the job done.

This is the first book I’ve ever read put out by Packt, a relatively young publishing company. I found this to bode well for them and was interested to read in the back of the book that they donate part of the proceeds of any book to the open source project that is covered by any book they sell. I thought this was an interesting idea and a good way for readers to support the projects they are interested in. The book is also available from Packt as a PDF, with some access controls, though they are not as onerous as some I have seen for e-books.

Title: WordPress Theme Design
Author: Tessa Blakeley Silver
Publisher: Packt Publishing Ltd.
Pages: 211
ISBN: 1847193099
Rating: 9/10
Tagline: A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes.