WordPress is the best and the easiest tool to build a website. However, to make an unique, beautiful and powerful WordPress site, people are required to have more professional skills to redesign, maintain and improve their websites after installation. In below, we listed out 6 best WordPress books here to help people gain real insight into WordPress.
Best WordPress Books for Beginners
If you new to WordPress and only want to know how to use WordPress better, then WordPress All-in-one for Dummies and WordPress 5 Complete are pretty much the best Books for you.
WordPress All-in-One For Dummies
Fully updated for the newest WordPress release, WordPress All-in-One For Dummies contains all the knowledge from installing software and plugins, publishing contents, using social media for SEO to managing several sites with WordPress. Besides, it also includes essential and easy tips, techniques and suggestions collected from WordPress authorities.
- Displays easy-to-understand intermediate to advanced coverage of the WordPress
- Eight mini books that cover knowledge and skills of setting up, publishing, customizing and managing WordPress website
WordPress 5 Complete
Book WordPress 5 Complete is highly recommended to WordPress newbies, since it covers all the needed basic and more advanced knowledge of WordPress. It can help people create and expand their WordPress website easily and quickly, without requiring web and programming experience. The following are some of the highlights in this book:
- Clear and practical explanations helping explore all aspects’ functional contents of WordPress
- Everything need for building a successful WordPress site from scratch
- Clear, easy-to-follow, concise; rich with examples and screenshots
- In-depth coverage of installation, themes, plugins, and syndication
Best WordPress Books for Developers
WordPress Plugins and Themes give use the capability to customize and enhance a WordPress blog without changing WordPress core source codes. As a WordPress developers, you nee to learn the architecture of WordPress and master how to write WordPress plugins and themes. In below, we will recommend 3 books to those who want to be a professional WordPress developers.
Professional WordPress: Design Development
Professional WordPress: Design Development provides methods for developing and designing in WordPress by covering HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, custom taxonomies, Multisite, and extensions of themes, etc. If you want to have only one book about WordPress development, then Professional WordPress: Design Development is the one.
The book replaced some of the basic material with more advanced contents, and makes it more suitable for professionals.
- Combines a developer view of user experience and optimization with the deployment requirements for performance, security, and measurement
- Offers an overview of the WordPress system and describes what happens when a WordPress-generated web page is displayed
Professional WordPress Plugin Development
Professional WordPress Plugins Development is more targeted that brings a practical way to write Plugins for WordPress, the book also include plenty of code examples.
This book shows readers how plugins work, reviews the tools and APIs available in WordPress, and demonstrates how to extend the functionality of WordPress with plugins, at the same time.
- Learn the plugins at different complexity, you could see the case of a very simple plugin to an extremely complex social network module.
- Explore some advanced features of WordPress, such as HTTP API, Java Script, the Rewrite API, and more
- Get to know how to store data to database in WordPress, how to define user roles and permission, and how to increase the security of WordPress.
Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog
As one of the most popular resources for WordPress designers and developers, Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog gives all the newest and greatest information of WordPress to help people maximize the potential and powerful of their WordPress websites. From the book, people can understand:
- How WordPress actually works behind the scenes
- How custom post types and details work, can be used for, and how can make them appear in regular content flow
- How to build a WordPress project for SEO, beautiful and unique WordPress themes and create amazing navigation
Best WordPress Book about SEO
SEO is very important for all WordPress blog, however there is very few good book talking about this, and WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization is the best of them.
WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization
For this book, people are able to learn everything from keyword research and link building to customer conversions in this complete guide, as well as discover the SEO techniques to make their WordPress website range to the top of the search engine.
Here are what WordPress Search Engine Optimization cover:
- Understand the elements that search engines use to rank websites, and help people to optimize their site for high ranking and more visitors
- Build high-quality, high-value links from other websites to raise websites’ rankings in search engines
- Avoid common SEO mistakes that can get their sites penalized by search engines
Top WordPress Development Tools
Besides checking out above WordPress books, you might want to check out some PHP books and learn more on WordPress Development tools are recommended in those books which will speed up your learning progress on it.
Plugin & Theme Development Tools
Whenever you are planning to set up a local development environment for a WordPress project, making sure have the following tools installed in advance can make twice the result with half the result.
GenerateWP
GenerateWP is a set of tools created for helping developers build custom and good quality code for your WordPress project with ease and quick with the help of the latest WordPress coding standards and API’s.
Upon sign-up, you can freely select from dozens of generators like Shortcodes Generator, Toolbar Generator, wp-config.php Generator, Widgets Generator, WP_Query Generator, and etc. to enhance your workflow. GenerateWP makes use of user-friendly forms to output valid code, so you just need to copy the ready-to-use code directly to your WordPress project as needed.
Developer
The Developer plugin helps optimize your development environment by ensuring that all the essential tools and plugins have been installed correctly.
On activation, you will need to decide what type of website you are developing:
- Plugin for a self-hosted WordPress installation;
- Theme for a self-hosted WordPress installation;
- Theme for a WordPress.com VIP site
Based on your choice, the Developer plugin will then provide you with additional plugins to install and activate for better suit you needs.
Design Tools
There is no denying that good design is vital to your success online. Visitors will stop staying with your WordPress website if it is unappealing, regardless of how powerful functionality it comes with.
Font Awesome
This is an iconic font and CSS toolkit that allows you to fully customize all vector icons from size to color and drop shadow with the power of CSS. Besides, Font Awesome is desktop friendly and can help make your icons accessible on the web as well.
uilang
As a UI-focused programming language, uilang helps create custom user interface components, add interactivity to your WordPress site, build prototypes and etc. easily and quickly. In addition to features like being fast, multi-platform, and extremely lightweight, uliang plays nicely with JavaScript, which means that you can code UI effects and behaviors with uliang while letting developers implement the logic in JavaScript.
Plain Pattern
Plain Pattern is an SVG-based seamless pattern maker that makes it possible for you to quickly create a website background by choosing from a few present patterns or uploading your own. It offers a super intuitive interface that every person can understand how to make full use of it in seconds.
Browser Extensions
Browser Extensions extend your web browser with additional features, modify web pages, and integrate your browser with other services you use so as to streamline your workflow.
Firebug
Firebug is an addon for Firefox that puts a wealthy of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. In the help of the plugin, you can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page as you like. Apart from that, Firebug is a useful tool for web security testing and web page performance analysis as well.
Dimensions
This is an extension for the Chrome browser allowing you to measure screen dimensions. You can use Dimensions to measure everything you see in the browser, including images, input-fields, buttons, videos, gifs, icons, and text. For the best experience, you can set a keyboard shortcut in the Extension Settings if you’re using the Chrome browser to quickly enable and disable the extension.
WordPress Site Manager
If you’re running with multiple WordPress websites and tired of constantly logging in and out of different sites, WordPress Site Manager can help store your site’s information therefore you can access to the main pages of your sites quickly and easily. This extension also change the WordPress theme editor into a CodeMirror editor for extending its functionality.
IDEs
Integrated Development Environment, (also known as IDE), refers to a software suite that is designed for consolidating the basic tools you need when writing and testing software. Typically, an IDE is composed of a compiler/interpreter, a code editor, plus a debugger.
Synchi
Synchi is a powerful IDE empowering you with powerful IDE features in WP editor of plugin, theme, and article HTML in addition to syntax highlighting.
Synchi is a full IDE, meaning that you can enjoy code creation experience inside your WordPress regardless of where you are and without any external code editor. As well, you don’t need to leave the plugin or theme editor page for saving files as they are now opened in tabs for your convenience.
Codekit
Codekit is a Mac app built to help you create websites faster and better. Compiling Less, Sass, Stylus, Jade, Haml, Slim, Javascript, CoffeeScript, Markdown, TypeScript, and Compass files automatically, Codekit lets you easily set options for each language on a file-by-file basis. Refreshing any browser including PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and kitchen fridge, Codekit enables you to have a real-time watch of changes in your WordPress websites and see the websites across devices with no need to hit command+R again.
More than that, no matter what components you want install, you can accomplish it in a single click with Codekit and then get start with it by dropping your project on the app.
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a cross-platform text editor for code, markup and prose. Along with the editor are rich features that you can get benefits from.
Firstly, it allows you to interactively make ten changes at the same time. Secondly, with a few keystrokes, you can search for what you want, without ever having to navigate through the menus or remember obscure key bindings. Everything in Sublime Text is customizable with simple JSON files thus granting you the ability to specify settings on a per-file type and per-project basis. Furthermore, there is a powerful plugin API based in Python coming with a console letting you interactively experiment in real time.