good books or tutorials to understand WordPress Programming

Question

Hi,

I want to learn/make wordpress plugins. So to start, I thought of taking some tutorials about Wordpress (the engine). I already know how to make a blog post, or change a theme. I want a tutorial about Wordpress Core Engine, that explains how Wordpress works, loop work, plugin are implemented...

So far, there are books and tutorials for themes and plugins, but for Wordpress (alone) there aren't. I searched also some tables of content of some books, but there isn't an introduction to Wordpress programming, either directly to themes or to plugins.

How did you learn Wordpress?

Answer 1

Have you seen this link?: http://wordpress.org/about/books/

Also, I've heard that this book is very good: http://digwp.com/book/

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Try WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide (Packt Publishing, 2009) by Vladimir Prelovac. It seems to be exactly the kind of thing what you're looking for.

You can read reviews on Amazon, or check the author's website for a longer description and links to several reviews.

Answer 3

I can recommend the following books on Wordpress:

• WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide
• WordPress Theme Design

Packt alone has 11 books devoted Wordpress, along with many others that discuss Wordpress in the context of web publishing and web commerce.

I'd also recommend browsing the Wordpress Codex, which is filled with articles, tutorials, and all of the technical data about Wordpress. Beyond that, you're going to have to start browsing the source code.

Answer 4

Personally I think there is such a wealth of information on the net, you never need spend a penny on mastering WP plugin development.

Google, SO, WordPress forums, countless WordPress plugin tutorial sites and the Codex are all a click away. Plus you simply can't beat a good PHP IDE and just browsing though the source of WordPress core and popular plugins!

The big trouble with books (and this goes not just for WordPress) is that they get outdated - quickly.

I've read Prelovac's book, and to be honest, I didn't find it that useful. Don't get me wrong, it's a well written book, covers all the essentials, but it's nothing I hadn't (or couldn't have) learnt from said resources above.

Plus having been published Feb '09, it can be assumed he was working with 2.6/2.7 whilst writing - 3.0 is already out, and the book may well contain outdated methods, not to mention the fact it won't cover anything on the new custom post types API!

I can safely say for sure that one section of the book is already deprecated - the Widget API changed considerably in 2.8 (~June 2009), yet there's a whole chapter in the book that walks you through widgets in a <2.8 era.