WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide) was published just under a year ago. It was good to see, for a couple of reasons. First, WordPress gains legitimacy from books being published about it. Second, the Visual Quickstart Guides, in my limited experience of them, tend to be pretty good at doing what they set out to do.
One of the problems with books on software is that they tend to age quickly. I suspect that’s why the title of the book is WordPress 2 rather than simply WordPress. But the title betrays the fact that it’s about 2.0, and 2.1 added some significant new features.
WordPress isn’t just rapidly-changing software; it is, for many people, software as a service (SaaS) at WordPress.com. There are no version numbers there, simply the current version of the software. So, although the book does cover the difference between WordPress.com and the WordPress you download and install yourself, WordPress.com has moved on quickly since the book was written.
To the authors’ considerable credit, they actively maintain a blog related to the book (running on WordPress). Their book is pretty good, as dead tree account of growing software go.
The book does serve as an example of a book that was out of date soon after it was published. Although obsolete might be too harsh a word, this is an example of how books related to SaaS are at particularly high risk of early bibliolescence.
One thought on “Bibliolescence: WordPress 2”