Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog

The author clearly knows his stuff, but can't write. The publisher either assigned a greenhorn editor, or one who was terrified of technical subject matter and so did nothing. I have honestly not seen a worse-edited or more poorly-organized or poorly-written book in all my years of reading technical material. Proof of the publisher's abject failure with this book is evident in the typographical and grammatical errors. When the a major heading in the table of contents in a book about Wordpress includes a misspelling of Wordpress ("Wordpres"), it's clear this project was bungled. The rest of the manuscript is rife with such mistakes. Where was the editor and proofreader? How could they permit the author to write like a guy talks over beers, with no intent to communicate information in a useful way? On the content side, the author seems to be an expert who cannot express himself clearly. He's not the first, and that's what editors are for. That's too bad, because I found some great ideas in the book - but they were useless because antecedent information was omitted, explanations were unclear, and the structure of the material was disorganized. I don't like writing such a negative review because I'm a writer myself. But there is no excuse for a publisher of Wiley's stature and reputation to put out a sheaf of unorganized draft pages like this and call it a book. I gave it one star because it has nice glossy pages and a good list of Wordpress plugins. Otherwise, I found it useless.