Keyvan Nayyeri

While Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Conference 2008 has begun in Redmond and some attendees gave updates on the free offer of my Professional Visual Studio Extensibility book, it’s time to wrap up on the latest updates on my forthcoming Beginning ASP.NET MVC book. I have not opened a book factory but it looks like that giving regular updates about my books has become a common part of my blog posts!

Last month I announced the book publicly and gave some initial impressions about it and since then Simone and I have been working on the content smoothly to add new chapters. At the moment, we’re very close to 50% milestone and this is excellent! While we were working on the book, Wiley/Wrox tried to promote the book and spread it over the web by adding appropriate pages to Amazon and Wiley official site.

They added an Amazon UK page with a pre-order offer as well as an Amazon German page with the same offer. They also created a page on main Amazon site that doesn’t have any pre-order option yet but I guess it will be available for pre-order within next a few days.

Besides, Simone took his author photos and Wrox designers created an initial cover for the book to help its early promotion and this new cover is available along the newly created book page on Wiley official site.

Speaking of the book cover, you see the difference in our clothing as I have taken my photo in mid-Fall 2007 in a cold weather and Simone has taken his photo this Summer (two weeks ago)! In my opinion cover could be better if they had put our photos nearer to each other, nonetheless our styles are a little different!

As you see on the book page on Wiley, March is the proposed release time of the book but this date is really subject to change. Earlier today I had a short chat with Simone and we agreed that there is a high chance to change this schedule as there are some possible changes in the ASP.NET MVC release schedule in the next couple of months. Moreover, based on our initial prediction book is going to be approximately 500 pages long and covers a variety of common topics about ASP.NET MVC for a beginner to intermediate ASP.NET developer level.

I think that this book is going to be written very well and we have enough time to work and improve it. By the way, it seems that we’ll have some revisions in the content as there are (or will be) changes in the ASP.NET MVC that affects our content. While writing a book for a Beta software (preview in our case) has some advantages for sales and marketing, it also has some disadvantages in the area of the time and effort that it takes for authors to deliver the best quality and most recent updates in the product.

Also I had stated that there is a high chance to have a slight update in the book title with version number and I still think that this most likely happens in the future. PDC 2008 in October should have important news about the ASP.NET MVC that help us on future decisions.