Way back in January Steve Jones presented the idea to bundle the best content

of the year into a book format that we are affectionately calling The

Best of SQLServerCentral.com 2002. Reader response was good and it seemed

like a fun project, so we decided to proceed. Little did we know how much work

it would be!

Over the past five months we have put together about 380 pages of content that was

published in 2002 (with a few from 2001, our first year up) and have

painstakingly formatted all of the content to have a consistent look. Administration, DTS, data

warehousing, security, performance tuning - we've got something in the book on

all of those and more. It's a big book too, 8-1/2x11, easy to read.

Who's included in the book? We invited every author who had published

something with us in 2002 to participate. The response was overwhelming

positive. As of right now, here is the author list for the book:

Alexzander

Nepomnjashiy, Andy Jones, Andy Warren, Brian Kelley, Brian Knight

Bruce

Szabo, Cathan Kirkwood, Chris Cubley, Chris Kempster, Christoffer Hedgate

Daniel

Gallagher, Don Church, Don Frazier, Gregory Larsen, Greg Robidoux

Haidong

Ji, Herve Roggero, James Travis, Jayram Tallamraju, Jon Winer

Joseph

Gama, Kevin Feit, Leon Platt, Les Smith, Mattias Fagerlund, Morten Wittrock

Neil

Jacobson, Neil Weicher, Rahul Sharma, Randy Dyess, Robert Marda, Sean Burke, Steve

Jones

Once we got started and knew that we could make it work, we had several long

discussions how about to get it published. One of our biggest goals was to make

the book affordable. I mean really affordable, $20 or less, something that would

represent an outstanding value for the money. As we discussed our options, it

became clear that to meet that goal we would have to go out on a limb and handle

the publishing ourselves. Are you picturing us slaving over the laser printer? Not

quite. We're sending the book to a professional book printer, it should look

just like any book you'd buy at the bookstore. 

It's a lot of work, and a bit of a risk. You can't call a printer and order

50 copies, they want a minimum run of 500 and you don't achieve much in the way of

decent pricing unless you order a 1000 or more. So...how many do we order and

how much do we risk? We need to get an idea of how many of you would really be

interested in buying a copy (or more) so that we order enough, but not too many.

First, let me say that we're committed to shipping the book. Currently we expect to ship beginning August 1st. List

price will be around $30, the price for members of the site will be $18 plus $5

shipping (orders outside the US we'll have to charge more for shipping). That's

not quite as low as we hoped, but we do have a special offer - register with us

before July 17th  indicating you would like to purchase a copy and we'll

give you a $3 discount, bringing the price down to $15 plus shipping.

But wait - there's more!

It's all about ordering the right quantity and the more you order, the better

the pricing. If we can order more, we can discount the price some more. If we

can get 1000 readers to register before July 17th, we'll drop the price for ALL

orders done here on the site to $15 - and you still get to apply the $3 discount

if you registered.

It doesn't cost you anything to register, you don't have to give us your

credit card number, you don't even have to fill out a form - just click a

button. Please remember that we're going to be ordering based on those clicks.

If you're not sure you want to order, please don't register. When the book is ready to ship, we'll email you explaining how to place

your order and how to pay for it. We hope you'll order a copy, or maybe better

yet, get your company to order a copy. It's a great

reference, either for you or someone you're mentoring. 

Registration Link: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/bestof/

If you've got comments or questions, post in the attached discussion area. We

look forward to those comments!