Tod means Fox

Over the past few months I’ve had the book “WordPress Theme Design” on my desk ready to be reviewed (it’s another book from Packt publishing). I finally got to it earlier this week. You can read my review over at Amazon. I gave it 3 stars mainly because it wasn’t complete and lacked some of the details I’d like to see in a “guide” book. But I can’t say I didn’t learn anything.

One of the reasons I picked up this title was because I’ve been itching to redesign Tod means Fox. I use WordPress (and like it very much) and have all the tools (and some questionable skills) for a redesign. But don’t worry, any redesign will have the same glorious orange that helps remind me of FoxPro, Firefox, ING, Packt, and Holland! But honestly, It’s been a while and I’m restless. I also want a redesign to be done entirely on my new iMac. If I do it quick enough, it will be my first real work performed on the new machine.

It turns out though that the book wasn’t very helpful. I’m sure it will sit on my shelf until some day in the distant future when its time to “clean up” the office. I’ll likely be on revision n of Tod means Fox, and who knows where WordPress will be. But I suppose that’s the nature of buying technology books.

Very few tech books stand the test of time. Those that do are usually pure reference and theory books and not how-to books.

I keep reference books (like the PHP Cookbook, The Complete Reference: MySQL, and of course the Hacker’s Guide to Visual FoxPro) at arms length. These books I go to often. Then there are the theory books. These are books I keep further away but access often — and usually not in front of the computer. Books like Kimball’s The Data Warehouse Toolkit and Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards fit into this category.

OK, enough babbling. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on a redesign, WordPress, time-tested tech books, or the fabulous color orange.