Reddit reviews Professional WordPress: Design and Development
We found 4 Reddit comments about Professional WordPress: Design and Development. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Wrox Press
Yes! This is the book. It was just updated in January. Read the reviews and you'll see that it is highly thought of.
I just got mine a few weeks ago and it is great.
First up - do you have hosting? Can you install WordPress there? Have you written or edited posts and Pages on a WordPress site? If not, make that a priority.
mrstejdm's suggestions are excellent - much depends on how you prefer to learn (books? videos? articles?) so here are a few to get you started.
Resources
The Codex is surprisingly good, you could start there and supplement your learning with books and courses. Look out for Morten Rand-Hendriksen at Lynda.com and on Twitter. Great instructor.
The WordPress Handbook, also full of great, searchable information.
The Loop
The WPMUDev blog (https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/) has some great content too.
Books
Digging into WordPress by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr could be a good starting point (it's visually very attractive).
Professional WordPress: Design and Development 3rd Edition is also very good.
Yeah, WordPress.org has a learning curve.. don't let people tell you otherwise. The web is full of bad advice and out dated blog articles. The Codex is a good place to start, but even that has problems at this point. It's old tech with some weird parts.. very useful, but not modern. And there has recently been a push to modernize it.. that's great, but it's even more confusing to learn now, imo.
I read a useful book about WordPress aimed at developers just to help me wrap my head around the weirdness of WordPress. It isn't complete, but it was a good start for me (helped me sort through the trash pile that an open web search produces).
WordPress for Deb's
My route to building websites was basically Codecademy for HTML/CSS and then these two books (probably out date here):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-Website-Missing-Matthew-MacDonald/dp/1491918071/
&
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-WordPress-Development-Brad-Williams/dp/1118987241/
and any foundation knowledge gaps from these two were plugged by searching the Wordpress Codex which is the knowledge base: https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development and quite often WP Beginner: https://www.wpbeginner.com/
I also saw this posted here which I bookmarked as I though it was useful: https://medium.com/@adamchodson/barebones-approach-to-developing-a-modern-wordpress-theme-6fc44ab7a25b?sk=0511e966debf50d4b6e88a966c7791d7
I didn't really use YouTube although it's undeniably has the potential to be a great learning resource.
Only disclaimer I have is that I'm a hobbyist Web Dev and don't do it as my full time job. There's people out there who can definitely recommend a better approach to take to learning WordPress then what I've written. YMMV.