Eight chapters by four experts on theming WordPress.
There are more than a few books out there on theming WordPress. Still, Sitepoint has a history (unless you go way back to the early 2000s when the content was just as reliable as now, but the layout seemed to be done by a talented MS Word user) of creating visually inviting books and Wicked WordPress Themes is no exception. The book is eight chapters on theming WordPress written by four experts in WordPress and WordPress 3 used.
Taking a bit of a different track, the book doesn’t dive right into the nuts and bolts of creating templates, rather the first part of the book asks readers to think about what they want to achieve and how to think about templates. Chapter two is about planning your theme and chapter three is about theme design in general. Only by chapter four do readers get into WordPress-specific questions.
Chapters four and five cover all the ins and outs of actually creating the themes. Chapter six also covers widgets, how to make your own and how to make your theme widget-ready. Finally, chapter seven, “Theme Options” includes how to make your theme customizable by users.
Chapter eight-chapter deals with selling your theme, a topic that doesn’t get much coverage. The chapter covers how to do it properly. See the last summer’s Thesis theme controversy. Written by Jeffrey Way (of Theme Forest fame), so he’s got a fair number of tips on how to get people interested in buying.