Rockstar WordPress Designer VS Digging Into WordPress

WordPress is a tool worth getting acquainted with, whether its following online tutorials or investing into knowledge, i.e. purchasing an eBook. Rockstar WordPress Designer VS Digging Into WordPress is a review on two well known eBooks by two groups of authors, Collis Ta’eed & Harley Alexander and Chris Coyier & Jeff Starr. They both offer breakdowns on the WordPress CMS, taking the beginner by hand and showing them some practical lessons in the hope that they will get better and be motivated to improve their WordPress coding skills.

The reason why I titled this as a ‘versus’ match is because I wanted to compare what the authors were offering and which one would be best, in my opinion, to have on your virtual bookshelf.

ROCKSTAR WORDPRESS DESIGNER (Collis Ta’eed & Harley Alexander)

So first up we have Rockstar WordPress Designer by Collis Ta’eed & Harley Alexander. The 2010 Revised Edition eBook aims to help you “learn step by step how to take a straight HTML website and power it with WordPress”.

This extract below from the website sums up what you are going to get from this eBook:

During the course of the book you’ll build THREE WordPress themes, a blog, a portfolio site and a general site with menus and submenus. Each theme demonstrates different aspects of WordPress theming and all three are packaged in with the book so you’ll have Photoshop, HTML, CSS and WordPress PHP files to refer to.

All they ask is that you have $29, a solid understanding of HTML/CSS, and not necessarily PHP. The eBook is split into 9 chapters with just over 310 pages of content. The early chapters will help you understand the general terms and concepts in WordPress, such as posts, categories, tags, permalinks etc… and the later chapters deal with building three themes and provides resources to Innovative Ways to Using WordPress to build Membership Directories, E-Commerce Store, Social Media Feed Aggregators, Musician/Band Website, Design Gallery, Review Sites and more.

DIGGING INTO WORDPRESS (Chris Coyier & Jeff Starr)

Digging into WordPress is a collaboration between Chris Coyier & Jeff Starr. The WordPress Version 3.0 Launch gives a comprehensive knowledge into the core WordPress System, with useful tips and tricks like “Keeping sites secure and optimized” and “Best practices for maintaining a healthy site”. This summary explains what you learn in this eBook:

We go into depth about the anatomy of a WordPress theme. How they work, and how to write the code you need to do the things you want. This means real code that you can sink your teeth into, as well as copy and paste. Beyond theme building, we introduce many tricks your file can pull off and show you ways to increase performance and security through HTAccess.

I have not grabbed a copy yet of their eBook, although I have read their free PDF Sample, and must say that I was straightaway impressed with the content they were giving, compared to Rockstar WordPress Designer, $27 for the eBook is really a no-brainer! The purchase comes with 12 huge, colour-coded Chapters, split into roughly 71 sections with over 420 pages of content.

Digging into WordPress is perfect for WordPress users in the beginner to intermediate range, but contains plenty of great information for the advanced user as well. If you have any level of experience working with web design or WordPress, this book is written to help you take WordPress to the next level.

If you are not sure which works for you, how about you read an expanded review.