Review from Pro WordPress Plugin Development Book Reader
The content is well structured and gets right to the point, so don’t expect any motivational speeches or manifesto’s in the style of Gary Vaynerchuk or Seth Godin. This is purely related to how to create better WordPress plug-ins, free of any politics or opinions. In other words, a perfect companion for your keyboard.
That being said, I find the following chapters to be of great value to me (being on the theme side of the business):
- 6) Plugin Security
- 7) Plugin Settings (mainly dealing with the various API’s)
- 13) Cron
- 16) Debugging and Optimizing
Most other book to date that talked about WordPress Plugin Development went around coding examples and solving particular problems. That’s ok, but you’ll never have a birds eye view of the entire API ecosystem. This is where “Professional WordPress Plugin Development” shines. Each little api function that is available in WordPress is explained in a consistent way and also shows how it interacts with the rest of the system.
This book is a dream come true for anyone who is just starting out developing plugins for WordPress. Normally you have to spend countless hours of digging through code, google search results just to find half-finished instructions. This book is a handy resource full of best practices that I wish were told to me when I started coding.
Interview with the authors by WPCandy
Of course if you read WPCandy, you should absolutely purchase Professional WordPress Plugin Development. While I can’t officially review it yet (my copy’s in the mail), knowing the quality of work that these guys do individually I expect only the best from their book.