Since I was on the hunt for a blogging platform, I thought that “Getting Started with Ghost” by Packt Publishing would be a great way to get a good basis for Ghost. I was not disappointed. “Getting Started with Ghost” did a great job of pulling me and keeping in the book throughout most of it.

From the start, it did a great job of giving me some insight to the company, and hosting options (including, but not limited to using Ghost(Pro)). I found it fascinating that Ghost is a for-non-profit.  Being hosted at Ghost(Pro) allows you get the latest features.

While you will get a quick overview of publishing, un-publishing and editing posts; the bread and butter of this book is helping you develop your own themes and look. I really wasn’t expecting to go so in depth on theme development.

You will go through how to set up an environment for theme development on most major operating systems. The book quickly goes over some of the templating language to get the reader familiar with what they will be looking at and goes in much depth line by line over the basic settings for building a theme.

The author guides you through choosing the look and feel for the design of your blog through a series of questions and solutions consisting of code examples.

This is a well written book that I would recommend to anyone wanting to get started with Ghost or developing themes for Ghost.

I am excited to get my blog moved over from WordPress over to a self hosted Ghost instance.  Ghost feels very responsive and adapts well for mobile display.  I’ve even done some playing around with posting via my Android phone and was quite pleased.