Books
Over the last dozen years, I’ve published four books, which you can find through the various links on this page. I’m proud of all of them, and while dated, even the older ones have their uses.
Are you a publisher interested in having me write for you? Contact Carole Jelen at The Waterside Agency.
WordPress in Depth
with Bud Smith
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- InformIT
- Amazon.com
, where a tiny percentage of your purchase goes to help sustain this site. - Barnes & Noble (even if they still don’t have the proper authors listed)
- Powell’s Books
- Borders
As a WordPress user of some longstanding, it was great to be able to do this. Even better was working (via email and Skype) with Bud Smith. I wrote the last four chapters and a couple appendices, while Bud did most of the heavy lifting.
The book is designed to get you from being a new user of WordPress.com through the transition to installing self-hosted WordPress (recognizing that this isn’t a typical path). We give advice in choosing themes, hosts, and plugins (which our publishers insisted
on spelling “plug-in” with a hyphen). From there we show you how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) create themes, and make it relatively easy to tweak them. Then we show you just enough PHP to get a start on making new plugins.
You’ll become a smarter WordPress user, whatever your skill and experience level. We incorporated a fair amount of information about v2.9, so we got it as close to up-to-the-minute as we possibly could.
Got questions or feedback? Contact me!
SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed and openSUSE Linux Unleashed
These books taught me one important lesson: It is darn near impossible to know everything about an operating system, particularly one as robust and full of applications that the openSUSE distribution contains. For this reason, I can tell you I learned an awful lot writing these books, and shared everything I could.
Books in the Unleashed series aim to be comprehensive, doorstop-like reviews of their topics aimed at the intermediate skill level. My expertise was mostly on the desktop side of things. So the first book began my education about programming, database administration and network administration. One goal that I worked hard to achieve was a comprehensive review of the YaST system administration tool. After five years as a SUSE user, I had never seen everything in YaST documented. You’ll find that in both editions.
The fine folks at Sams chose the openSUSE distribution—and my book—as the basis for its Linux Starter Kit. My book in PDF form is the reference for this easy-to-understand way to get started with Linux.
openSUSE Linux Unleashed, covering openSUSE Linux v10.3, made the Linux Journal Reader’s Choice ballot for favorite Linux book of 2007. It didn’t win, but it really was an “honor to be nominated.”
Arco Computer Certification Handbook
One night in the spring of 1999, I got an email message out of the blue from an acquisitions editor at Arco Press. The venerable publisher of prep books for civil service and college entrance exams was branching out a little into technology certification programs. Would I be interested in writing a guide to these programs?
I finished this task around the end of the year, and the book came out in the spring. The first half of the book is really about deciding on a career path, which isn’t all that dated. The other half offered a set of pages identifying around 200 certification programs, with tips in test-taking and training venues. Since this came out at the height of the dotcom boom, I wonder just how many links in that book are still good.
