Published in 2005, this book has, to an extent, become obsolete. In general the HTML hasn't changed, but during the last few years Blogger has updated its interface so what you see as an example in the book won't correspond 1-to-1 with what you'll see on today's Blogger pages.

Now if this doesn't intimidate you, then you might go ahead and consider this little book for a quick-look-see into how Blogger works. (I'd get it from the library though).

Here's the TOC so you can see what's covered.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Starting your blog
Writing your blog
Blogging from afar
Personalizing your blog
Telling others about yourself
Getting others to contribute
Hosting your blog yourself
Getting the word out
Appendix a: template tags
Index

Appearance of the material: Nice format with enough color to keep it interesting. The font is large-ish so that I didn't have to wear me specs. In general, there's not alot of text which is something I appreciate. Ms. Castro gets down to business without a great deal of fluff.

The material is taught using the "screen shot" approach. This approach seems to work well for computer oriented learning.

My Impressions

I actually got this book from the library because I wanted to check out Ms. Castro's writing style. (I'm interested in her book on HTML.) And while the screen shots of the menus no longer correspond with Blogger today I had no problem following what she was saying. I DO think it might be a problem for the true Newbie. If you are too timid to just throw yourself into Blogger and experiment, then this book will likely only succeed in confusing you.

To give an example, there is no Layout Tab in the book's Blogger examples.

Sooo, in my opinion the true residual use of the book is the html fixes that the author demonstrates. She shows, for example, how to rename "Archives" as "File Cabinet" in edit mode; and also how to change the look of the header, changing the padding and altering the color to exactly what you want. ( )

http://libdrone.blogspot.com/2007/09/... ( )