Fresh Click Media

Web and Software Development

Reviews, WordPress  |  March 1, 2010  |  0 comments

Digging into WordPress – version 2.0 released

If you haven’t read my review of Digging into WordPress, you may not know that I think it’s currently the best WordPress book available.

One thing I didn’t mention in the review is that when you buy it, you’re entitled to free PDF updates for life. Perhaps I left out this because I thought it would amount to the odd grammar correction and so on. Worthwhile, but not that exciting. How wrong I was, because as co-author Chris Coyier announces on the Digging into WordPress site, version 2.0 has been released and it promises an extra chapter dedicated to WordPress 2.9, as well as one called ‘Bonus Tricks’, which focuses on ‘some cool new tricks for your themes’. I’ve only skimmed through the new pages, but the high quality writing and content is preserved.

If you haven’t already grabbed yourself a copy, you should do yourself a favour and buy it! Continue reading

jQuery, Reviews  |  February 19, 2010  |  0 comments

jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide – Book Review

jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide

Unless they’ve been living in a cave for the last couple of years, web developers will be familiar with jQuery. Due to its speed, power and ubiquity, it’s become the de facto JavaScript library for anybody wishing to create cross-browser behaviour.

jQuery version 1.4 was released on January 14, 2009, and hot on the heels of that release is the accompanying ‘jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide‘ book from Packt. The book is nudging at 300 pages in length, and covers the API in a similar way to the excellent online documentation. This isn’t the book for readers with no JavaScript experience, but should be easy to pick up with somebody with at least a limited knowledge. Continue reading

Reviews, WordPress  |  January 30, 2010  |  0 comments

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design – Book Review

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

I seem to be reading quite a few WordPress books of late, and there are certainly a few to choose from. Packt Publishing’s WordPress 2.8 Theme Design’s tagline is ‘Create flexible, powerful, and professional themes for your WordPress blogs and websites’.

WordPress themes are of interest to me since they fuse a visual aspect with PHP code, and there’s no doubt that they appeal to many other people too. In this review, I examine how appealing the book is to theme beginners and more advanced users. Continue reading

Reviews, WordPress  |  January 2, 2010  |  2 Comments

Digging into WordPress – Book Review

Digging into WordPress

There are a huge number of books out there for WordPress, but ‘Digging into WordPress’, written by WordPress ‘veterans’ Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr stands out for a number of reasons.

The book’s been in development for a while, and the finished 400 pages are very polished and generally well written. The book is available from the Digging into WordPress website, and the site features a PDF Sample and containing the contents and Chapter 3 – ‘Anatomy of a WordPress Theme’. Continue reading