A couple of weeks ago I was invited to participate in the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. I thought I'd give it a try and requested a copy of Head First WordPress. While I've long been a big fan of the O'Reilly "animal cover" books, this was the first Head First title I'd looked at, and I'm really pleased I did because now I'm a fan.
I've been using Drupal for several years now, and have always thought of WordPress as the other big kid on the block, though had always considered it solely as a blogging platform. Working through the examples in this title show that it can act as a much fuller content management system, and I plan to spend a lot more time with the platform as a result.
The Head First series takes a very conversational and visual approach to teaching, and I found it a very quick read, but also an engaging and comprehensive. Having used Drupal for so long, the first few chapters were pretty basic for me, but I really appreciated the later chapters on security and optimization for performance, both areas I can make use of regardless of the platform.
I look forward to looking at a more complicated (for me) subject like PHP and MySQL using the Head First approach. If you're looking for a good introduction to WordPress I think you'd find this book a winner.