Book Review: WordPress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide

A few weeks ago, Packt Publishing, the publisher of many web-related books, contacted me. They had just released a new book on WordPress MU 2.8 and they asked for a book review.

I guessed it would be a pretty interesting book for the WordPress enthusiasts on WP Toy, so I agreed on the review. They send over the book and I start reading.

WordPress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide

This beginners guide will lead you through the process of building a WordPress MU community. Lesley A. Harrison, the author of the book, teach you everything you need to know about a WordPress MU website and how to build the website.

Let us talk about different aspects of the book below:

The Cover

The cover looks alright, graphically not very outstanding, yet descriptive and easy to understand what the book is about. Packt publish all their WordPress related books in the same cover style. I have the WordPress plugin development; beginners guide lying in my book library too, and it looks almost identically.

The Content

The cover preached “Learn by doing: less theory, more results”, and that is absolutely true. Everything the author is implanting in the WordPress MU site has code examples, followed with screenshots with the changes. That way you know exactly what kind of code did what changes.

After the code, a smart “What just happened?” chapter follows up, explaining the code and screenshots. Really a less theory, more results approach, which works pretty well in this book. Everything is easy to understand and clear.

Book Design

The book design is where progress can be achieved. The book is printed in black and white (I guess to keep the price low), but that makes it a little bit boring. The typography is very basic. In my opinion, code snippets that have colors (just like dreamweaver’s color syntax) are much easier to understand and make the content less hard to read. With a better book design, I think it would be even easier to read this book.

Conclusion

The strong point of this book is the content. The content is written excellent, easy to follow and everything is illustrated with examples and screenshots. The design is somewhat different, as the book is a little bit boring and standard, there can be added a lot more color, typography and details to spice the book up.

In my opinion, when you are developing a WordPress MU site or if you are planning to do so, this book is a must. You will get information on how to set up everything from start to finish in a “less theory, more results” way.

Book Details & Ordering over at PacktPub.com (no affiliation link!)