Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

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    • WordPress for Web Developers (2013)
    • Beginning WordPress 3 (2010)
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    • Content Modeling for WordPress series
    • WordPress Hidden Gems series
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Book reviews: nonfiction

September 20, 2004 Stephanie Leary


Writing

Bird By Bird – Anne Lamott

By far the best book about living as a writer I’ve ever read. I hate that the title and the cover make it appear more like a birdwatching guide, but maybe someday we’ll get lucky and get a new edition.

Web Design

Defensive Design for the Web – 37Signals

This is a really excellent strategy book but offers no details on how to actually accomplish the recommended stuff. It’s more timeless this way but also less useful. I still recommend it, since most of the tricks are really easy to implement.

Web Design on a Shoestring – Carrie Bickner

I was slightly disappointed in this; turns out I’ve been doing shoestring design all along. I don’t like some of the recommendations here, like saving your clients money by charging them a small fee to host their site on your account. Why bother, when you can have the fabulous TextDrive, among others, for $5/month? The rest of the hosting discussion was good, as was the stuff on planning the site and avoiding scope creep was good (although that’s covered better in Web ReDesign). All in all, not bad as a best practices roundup, but not great either.

The Unusually Useful Web Book – June Cohen

This one actually lives up to its title. It’s aimed at ecommerce developers, and I suspect a good deal of it was written during the boom, but once you get past that bias it’s fantastic. The book design is awful though, to the point where some pages become hard to read because the designer was so hell-bent on getting all the little chunks into one page, or at most a two-page spread. Argh, argh, argh. This is a great book; it’s just kind of hard to read.

Web Standards Solutions – Dan Cederholm

Love it. This is a fabulous how-to on using standards in everyday design situations for people who’ve already been sold on the concept by Designing With Web Standards.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book – Robin Williams

Love it. Recommending it to everyone who hasn’t had formal design training.

Other

Seven Seasons of Buffy – Glenn Yeffeth

I haven’t quite finished this one, but it’s great brain candy, especially Laura Resnick’s piece.

Books

Fascism Watch

The Fascism Watch is a daily(ish) news roundup. View all the previous Fascism Watch posts »

Latest WordPress Book

Content Strategy for WordPress

A short book for content strategists and managers on implementing a complete content strategy in WordPress: evaluation, analysis, content modeling, editing and workflows, and long-term planning and maintenance.

Read the sample chapter

Kindle Nook iBooks Kobo Smashwords

WordPress for Web Developers

WordPress for Web Developers (9781430258667)

This is a book for professional web designers and developers who already know HTML and CSS, and want to learn to build sites with WordPress. The book begins with a detailed tour of the administration screens and settings, then digs into server-side topics like performance and security. The second half of the book is devoted to development: learning to build WordPress themes and plugins.

This is the second, much-revised and updated edition of Beginning WordPress 3, with a more accurate title. Everything’s been updated for WordPress 3.6.

WordPress for Web Developers is out now. See what's inside...

The best WordPress features you’ve never noticed

  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Screen Options
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Bulk Edit
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Private Status
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Dashboard Feed Readers
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Options.php

Content Modeling for WordPress series

  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 1: analyze content
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 2: functional and organizational requirements
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 3: a sample content model

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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