Other WordPress books on the market discuss WordPress only in the context of blogging: how to set up a blog, how to write a blog, how to optimize a business blog. A few books offer detailed technical instructions on a specific aspect of the software, such as plugin or theme development.

Beginning WordPress is the first to discuss WordPress as a general content management system that can compete with other popular open source projects like Joomla or Drupal. This book also aims to be one of the first if not the first to cover the new WordPress 3.0.

Lastly, WordPress remains one if not the top blogging and content management platform, besides Joomla and Drupal. See http://wordpress.org/download/counter/ for just version 2.8.x. As of September 2009, Wordpress is used by 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide