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Publisher: No Starch Press Pages: 264, black & white ISBN: 978-1-59327-522-8 http://www.nostarch.com/websitecomic
Build Your Own Website is very much a book of two halves, whichever way you slice it. Divide it by page count and you've got the beginnings of two very good books, one on HTML and CSS, and the other covering WordPress. Divide it by style and you've got a comic pastiche of The Wizard of Oz intermingled with a normal technical book. When gluing disparate styles and topics together, it can sometimes be hard to produce a coherent result. So did this book manage to combine everything cleanly, or is the result a bit of a jumble?
Since the book is billed as “a comic guide…” I'll start with the comic. It follows the adventures of the comic's artist, Kim Gee, as she attempts to create her first web site, and is used to introduce the main themes of each chapter in a light-hearted and easy-to-read manner. The artwork is printed in black and white, and is perfectly functional if not particularly inspiring. This is definitely an educational comic, albeit one that doesn't take itself too seriously. But it's worth reinforcing that this is not a comic book for children, despite the colorful cover – not unless your kids are likely to prefer an educational tale about learning HTML to something involving Spiderman or My Little Pony.
Once Kim has completed each stage in her journey, the rest of the chapter reinforces what you've just learnt. It retreads the themes from the comic in more detail, and reads more like any ordinary technical self-help book would. These sections hold the bulk of the detail in the book, and are well written and easy to follow. If you're an absolute novice at HTML and CSS, then over the first half of the book these sections should do a good job of getting you up to speed on the basics.
When you reach the chapter 4, however, the book changes tack significantly. Everything you've just learnt about HTML and CSS is swept aside in favour of using WordPress. There's the occasional nod to the possibility of writing your posts in raw HTML, but the authors clearly think you should be using the visual editor instead. The rest of the book just covers the main parts of WordPress and how to install it. I say “install it”, but don't think you're getting a run-down on PHP and MySQL in this book: the only options that are really considered are to use a wordpress.com account, or to find a host which offers a one-click install of WordPress as part of their package. There are some basic examples of three such hosts given, but these are all US-centric.
There are the beginnings of two good books here – but the endings of neither of them. Continuing the HTML and CSS to the full length of the book would have allowed for more complex examples, perhaps a little Javascript, and an introduction to the browser's developer tools for debugging your site. A book this length on WordPress alone would have allowed the main topics a bit more breathing room, and given the opportunity to delve into more detail on some useful widgets, themes and plug-ins.
I find it hard to recommend this book, not because there's anything particularly wrong with it, but rather because I don't know who I would recommend it to. If you want to create a website, but don't know enough to decide between coding it yourself or using WordPress, this might give you just enough insight into both approaches to make that decision. But if you already know which approach you want to take, then at least half of this book will be wasted on you, whatever your choice.