Tag Archives: Book

WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s guide – Review

Sometime back, people from Packt Publishing contacted me asking whether I will be interested in reviewing their latest WordPress related book titled WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s guide by Vladimir Prelovac. Since the book suited my interests and also the topics which I write in this blog, I accepted, but got busy with RoloPress. Finally, I found some free time to read the book and here is my review. 🙂

Disclaimer: I just received a free copy of the ebook (in pdf format) for review. There was no condition that the review should be only positive and also I didn’t receive any payment for the review. So I am just writing what I felt about the book after reading it.packtpub-wordpress-plugins

About the author

As most of you would know the book’s author Vladimir Prelovac is a popular WordPress Plugin author who does WordPress development as a full time job. He is the “Been there, done that” kind of guy for anything related to WordPress (themes, Plugins, security etc.) and we can be sure that he knows what he is talking about (which is evident from the book).

About the book

The book consists of 8 chapters in which the author dissects and discusses about 6 of his Plugins explaining the code and concept behind them. The first chapter is a general introduction and in the eighth chapter he discusses about post-development activities for the Plugin like generating pot files, generating readme files, deploying etc.

Each Plugin (chapter) deals with different aspect of WordPress Plugin development like social bookmarking, using JavaScript and AJAX in Plugin, Widgets, shortcode API, custom templates, extending TinyMCE, custom post types etc.

Positives about the book

As Ozh says, this book is great for beginners who want to get their hands dirty and quickly learn the concepts behind WordPress Plugins. It can quickly put you on track and from where you can easily be on your own. (Even I wish I had something like this 4-5 years ago when I initially started with WordPress Plugin development)

In each chapter, the author gives a brief explanation about the Plugin and then gradually converts it into code. After each code listing he explains what the code does and how it does it, which would be very useful to grasp the fundamental concepts behind WordPress Plugin development.

Things which are not too good (for me)

The major thing which caught my attention was that, the book is slightly outdated in certain places. It doesn’t mean that the code in the book will not work, but what I mean is that there are certain new and better ways to do things. For instance, using old methods to parse RSS Feeds, having hardcoded paths to wp-content and wp-config.php file etc. Even some of the screenshots are pre 2.7

I wouldn’t blame the author or the publisher for it, because this is bound to happen to any technical book. But I would be really happy if there could be a v2.0 of the book with these changes. 🙂

The other thing which I didn’t like about the book is that most of the code samples doesn’t follow WordPress coding standard (especially camelcase function names). This is just a matter of personal preference but I would have loved if the author followed the recommended coding standards, since this book is meant for beginners.

Final Verdict

So my final verdict is that if you are a beginner or Intermediate WordPress Plugin developer then this book is a must have. It will easily get you on track.

Links

Posted in Books, WordPress | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

Recently I got some MP3 audio books from a magazine CD. I wanted to upload them to my iPod so that I can listen to them during my compute to office. But then I found that these were in MP3 format and not in iPod audio book format.

The main feature of the iPod audio book format is that the iPod can remember the last listening position and also we can adjust the reading speed in case, which is not possible if it is in MP3 format.

I started looking for a program to convert MP3 files to iPod audio book format and found an excellent program MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. It is free, opensource and the best part is that it works.

Download the program and install it. Once installed start the program from start menu and then click the Add button.

Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

Select the MP3 files and then click the Open button. (You can also press shift to select multiple files)

Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

Arrange the files in the correct order and then click the Start Conversion button. You can also edit the tags if you want.

Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

The program will ask to specify the file name and once given it will start the conversion.
Once the program finishes you can add the file to iTunes and then sync it with iPod. Happy Listening 🙂

Links:

You can download MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter from its download page.
You can also get some free Audio book from AudioBooksForFree.com

Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices | Tagged , , | 7 Comments