Blog Design Solutions is the book I've been hoping to find. As a recent convert to Wordpress, I'd been looking for a manual that could reveal it's workings and how to change them if I wanted. To be sure, there's lots of Wordpress stuff online, but I've been finding myself working pretty hard to dig out the useful bits. It's probably because I'm not versed in PHP, mySql, or really much on anything on the server side.

Enter Blogging Design Solutions. There's a chapter on Wordpress that takes a lot of the mystery out of playing around with themes, markup and exactly how the damn thing works. Very useful and that alone is worth the price of the book.

But the real value for me was the clearly written explanation of how to get Apache, mySql, PHP and even myPHPadmin running on my local machine. That's allowed me to put a copy of Wordpress locally so that I hack with it to my heart's content and not screw up the blog running on the server.

There are other chapters on Moveable Type, Expression Engine or Textpattern. And there's even a chapter on how to cobble together your own content management system.