Unless you love coding, there's no reason to build your website on any platform other than WordPress. WordPress is free, it's easy to use, it's highly customizable, and your site can be up-and-running within an hour. What's not to like?
Written using non-technical terms and language, this guide will walk you through a typical WordPress installation then jump off into how you can use WordPress' built-in features and functions to make it YOURS.
'WordPress Your Way' is a very informative read as well as a point of reference for people who use or intend to use WordPress.
I have been using WordPress for about 5 years but still learned a few things. For newbies especially the use of images is very helpful instead of endless text which many of these kinds of books do.
If you want a decent looking and running WordPress site then grab this gem by Nancy Hendrickson.
I've read at least 10 WordPress books in the last 7 months when I started my own genealogy site, http://idogenealogy.net. If I could only have two to use as reference this would be one of them.