There are many resources where you can learn about WordPress nowadays, however books still have a special status for me. Luckily, we do find some really amazing books about WordPress out there, and I’ll be highlighting them in this post.

These are all books from which I’ve personally learnt a lot.

Professional WordPress: Design & Development

Packed with real-world examples for load balancing and multiusers, this esteemed resource replaces some of the more basic material with more advanced content. Every single chapter has been reworked to provide the most current and proper methods for developing and designing in WordPress. Coverage of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript and new chapters on custom post types, custom taxonomies, Multisite, and extensions of themes bring the content of this book completely up-to-date and provides you with all you need to deploy successful WordPress sites.

• Offers an overview of the WordPress system and describes what happens when a WordPress-generated web page is displayed
• Demonstrates extending WordPress through plugins and customizing it via themes
• Combines a developer view of user experience and optimization with the deployment requirements for performance, security, and measurement
• Includes code downloads and code samples from the book’s website

You’ll be hard pressed to find a reliable resource with more advanced content than Professional WordPress, Second Edition!

Buy Professional WordPress: Design and Development (2nd edition)

WordPress Professional Plugin Development

As one of the most popular open source content management systems available today, WordPress boasts a framework that allows you to easily customize and extend it through plugins. This comprehensive book shows you how plugins work, reviews the tools and APIs available in WordPress, and demonstrates how to extend the functionality of WordPress with plugins.

The trio of established authors provides a practical, solutions-based approach along with a collection of timely examples and plenty of code, all aimed at clearly explaining how to create a plugin file, work with users, integrate widgets, add menus and submenus, secure your plugins, and more. You will quickly come to understand how to develop custom plugins so that you can take WordPress to the next corporate and enterprise level.

Professional WordPress Plugin Development:

• Details the range of complexity in plugins, from a very simple plugin to an extremely elaborate social network package
• Addresses how to integrate into WordPress, save settings, create widgets and shortcodes, and implement uninstall
• Learn the proper techniques for storing data, customizing user roles, and security best practices
• Shares techniques for using custom post types and creating and using custom taxonomies
• How to create plugins for WordPress Multisite networks
• Integrate user and role management
• Explores the HTTP API, JavaScript and AJAX, Cron, the Rewrite API, and more

Buy WordPress Professional Plugin Development

WordPress: The Missing Manual

Whether you’re a budding blogger or web development professional, WordPress is a brilliant tool for creating websites—if you know how to tap its impressive features. This jargon-free Missing Manual shows you how to use WordPress and its themes, plug-ins, and widgets to build just about any website you can imagine, from a classy blog to a basic e-commerce site.

The important stuff you need to know:

• Create a blog. Get a free WordPress.com account, choose the right theme, and start publishing content.
• Build a website. Produce a professional-looking business site by customizing a WordPress theme.
• Add features. Choose from thousands of WordPress widgets and plug-ins to extend your site’s features.
• Mix in multimedia. Include slideshows, video clips, webcasts, podcasts, and music players.
• Involve your readers. Let readers leave comments, contribute to your site, and carry on a dialog.
• Build an audience. Learn search-engine optimization, measure your reader’s favorite pages, and publicize your site.
• Create a community. Use social media tools such as “Like” and sharing buttons, and provide RSS feeds of your posts.

Buy WordPress: The Missing Manual

WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook

“WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook” is the perfect companion for plugin developers, offering easy-to-follow instructions to accomplish tasks that range from basic plugin creation and configuration to advanced customization techniques. Each topic is illustrated through realistic examples showing how it can be applied to solve common problems, followed by explanations of all concepts used.

Create WordPress plugins of varying complexity, from a few lines that change a specific function to complex extensions that provide intricate new capabilities.

From the creation of your first simple plugin to adding entire new sections and widgets in the administration interface, learn how to change and extend WordPress to perform virtually any task. After installing and configuring an efficient plugin development environment, you will discover how to register your own callbacks that WordPress will execute at key points, forming the basis of plugin creation. Armed with this essential knowledge, you’ll explore how to create administration pages to allow users to configure your new creations and to add new content management sections to WordPress through custom post types and custom database tables. Once you have all these elements in place, improve your plugins by customizing the post and page editors, creating user-facing forms to populate new content sections, making your plugin output dynamic using Javascript and AJAX as well as adding new widgets to the platform. Finally, see how to add support for multiple languages and distribute your work to the global WordPress community.

“WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook” provides you with tools to create any plugin you can imagine.

What you will learn from this book

• Prepare an efficient development environment
• Create your first plugins using WordPress action and filter hooks
• Add new sections to the administration interface for plugin configuration
• Create new content types using Custom Post Types or Custom Database Tables
• Make your content dynamic with JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX
• Add new widgets to the WordPress library
• Prepare your plugin to be translated for broad international use
• Get your new creations ready to be shared on the official WordPress site

Buy WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook

Do you have any other favourite WordPress books that you’d like to recommend? Let us know in the comments section.

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