I bought a book recently after seeing it mentioned in the WP dashboard news items, it’s called Wordpress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver and although a lot of the information regarding the functions of wordpress can be found at the codex, the book gives you so much more like the process gone through to design a theme from scratch.

I do quite a lot of sites in wordpress now and find it much easier to provide a client with a website that can be updated so easily, a few plugins here and there and you can provide a website that does all and more that’s needed.

Usually I get a standard theme and cut it up a bit and change the css to give me my site, or create in photoshop and send off for wordpressing but lately due to some more custom design requests I’ve received and the always dependable mistakes that freelancers can make I have wanted to do the whole thing myself from scratch..

I’ve downloaded a tutorial before about WP theme design from small potato before it was taken over and that was pretty darn useful but was made a little while ago so it wasn’t 2.5 specific.

That’s why I like what Tessa has put her book, it takes you step by step through the process of creating a non-blog wordpress blog, from sketch to WP core code. It’s made a big difference to my initial prototyping of concept sites and has really opened my eyes to what you can do with a bit of manipulation of the wordpress template tags. I’m even working on a magazine style front page for here so I can have a featured post for contests that stays up while it’s open for entries as well as excerpts to the regular posts..

You can buy the book printed or get it as pdf for a bit cheaper (I printed mine out from pdf on someone elses printer lol!) at packet publishing

Popularity: 5% [?]

This was a surprise, I originally bought it from an ebook store so I could read it on my HTC device, it turned out to be a really good book! I didn’t realize until much later that it was based around the mass effect game It was a nicely technical read and described how humans were using the alien Mass Effect devices to travel between the stars and what happened when they inevitably ‘bumped’ into the neighbors and started a fight. Typical Humans

---

This was a wonderfully wonderful book. Again, I downloaded it for my HTC. The author has made it available online at his website for free, you can download Postsingular in PRC, PDF or TXT. I used the PRC format on MobiReader and it was very easy to read. You can read Rudy Ruckers’ Blog here The story deals with what happens to human society after the Singularity of the development of AI and nanotech. The first three chapters could have been an entire novel by themselves and I would have been happy. This is not written in the same way as the other books here, it deals with something that would cause such a dramatic change in human behavior it would be hard to imagine. Rucker deals with this in a fantastic way, my only disappointment was when there was no more book to read!

---

My friend gave me this for my Birthday and I’ve just gotten around to reading it. I wanted to save it for a time when I could give it the attention a Richard Morgan book deserves. It is based around a character who is known as a ‘Thirteen’, a genetically engineered human who was part of a series of experiments to find a way to breed a human as ruthless and alpha as those found over 40,000 years ago before we became domesticated. An intelligent monster, feared around the globe. This is a detective novel set in the future, I’d like to say Bladerunner but this book is far more deep, as with other Morgan books, it does get a bit political but that only helps to weave the background to the rest of the story and characters. As a side note, I used to work with the Authors sister. I’m like almost famous.

---

All three of these books are worth buying for a loved geek or sci-fi fan, I really enjoyed them all immensely.

Popularity: 4% [?]