Best Way to Learn WordPress

Best way to do it is by watching videos on youtube and playing around with wordpress yourself. There are tons of courses and even more free information.

Youtube was how I learned wordpress as well. There are quite a few videos all about wordpress on there.

I was self taught just by playing around with it really

Install it, use it Then search for tutorials on specific things you don't know how to do.

Easiest ways to get going!

1 Get Wordpress Setup

Any of the following will get you setup. That is, get a basic wordpress intall for you to experiment with:

- (Costs You Money!) Get hosting with CPanel and Fantastico (easy software setup) e.g. hostgator www.hostgator.com Hatchling Plan only $6.95 if paying annually, or $8.95 by the month www.easyphp.org/modules [Hostgator is reliable and fairly priced.] Also check out jumpline, and siteground.

I use these for prototyping websites and testing out new plugins and themes before putting them on a live site!
- FREE -> Work on your computer, not off a webserver (download any of the following, all have Wordpress as part of package, just install and away you go!):
-- 1 Step Process: download and install http://bitnami.org/files/stacks/word...-installer.exe

-- Or, 2 Step Process (NOT Windows 7 Compatible):
----- Download this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qui...p.exe/download
----- The download this:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/qui...p.exe/download

2 Learn About Wordpress

Official Wordpress Site Documentation - very comprehensive:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons
Siteground Hosting Wordpress Tutorial (Easy to Understand and not too detailed):
http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/
As mentioned earlier there are good tutorials on YouTube if you prefer audio-visual learning.

3 Experiment With Wordpress

You can't really do a whole lot of damage if you're not working on a real live site. So, experiment away - it's absolutely the best way of learning once you have a basic site up and running!
Once wordpress is up you can login and you will see the 'dashboard' which is where you control everything in wordpress. Down along the left-hand side you will see, for Wordpress 3.0 on:

Dashboard (Your site management 'backend')
Posts (manage posts - new content, e.g. new articles, products etc.. oftent what people 'blog' about)
Media (Manage Images, video, sound, pdfs files etc..)
Links (Self explanatory!)
Pages (Manage static pages of content - stuff that doesn't change often e.g. Contact/About Us etc)
Comments (manage User Comments on your posts - approve/edit/delete
Appearance (Manage your website themes and layout - learn more: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes get more at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/)
Plugins (Manage your website functionality - learn more: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins - get more plugins at www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ usually you want Most Popular or Recently Updated rather than New plugins)
Users (Manage Your Users - just you when you first set up your site)
Tools (Various tools for importing/exporting content)
Settings (How your site functions/what users can do read/write/edit/delete content, way urls look etc..)

Also there are books by Packt Publishing and Sitepoint which would be good for a beginner.

That should get you going - if you're patient