EPiServer  /  CMS August 19, 2013

A book about EPiServer development

After years of blogging about EPiServer CMS I decided it was time to get real.

The cover of the new EPiServer book displayed in an iPhone and a Kindle.

I'm happy to announce a little project that I've been working on lately; a book about how to develop EPiServer CMS sites. I'm publishing it on Leanpub and embracing their motto of publishing early and publishing often. So, while the book is far from done I have published a first version of it and early buyers will be getting it a discounted price.

Content - current and planned

This is a project that I've been thinking about doing for several years but haven't quite gotten around to, until now. Despite having contemplated writing the book for years the exact table of contents isn't entirely decided yet, and I hope to get reader feedback to help guide it. However, the plan is roughly to cover:

  • General CMS concepts - I actually started writing this chapter about a year ago, but I'm not yet finished with it :)
  • Installation - "done"
  • Using the CMS - "done"
  • Core classes and concepts - "done"
  • Tools - "done"
  • A hands-on tutorial for building a first, simple site - in progress and a first version is featured in the current version of the book
  • Deep dives into content types, properties and templates
  • Caching and performance
  • How to build large scale sites, such as media sites
  • Different ways to build integrations
  • Extending the CMS in various ways

Whether I'll cover all of the above topics and/or other topics will probably depend on whether there is an interest for the book and on reader feedback.

The book is, and will be, written as a mix of theory and practical tutorials. The examples will be using MVC, primarily as I felt MVC made it easier to focus on EPiServer's API. However, there will be asides/notes describing how to achieve the same thing with Web Forms.

Pricing

Prior to publishing the book interested readers could sign up to be notified when it was published and also suggest a price. The average suggested price was $38 which is actually pretty closed to what I initially thought I'd charge for the book. However, I feel that early readers should be rewarded for taking the "risk" of buying an unfinished product and, even more, be rewarded for providing feedback. Therefor I've set the minimum price (buyers can choose their own actual price depending on how much they think it's worth) at $20 and will probably increase that in the future as the book progresses.

An e-book

Books on Leanpub are only available as e-books. If there's a lot of interest in a print version I may look in to that in the future, but for now I'm embracing the fact that it's possible to continously publish an e-book.

Leanpub books are published and made available to readers in PDF, EPUB (for iPad) and MOBI (for Kindle).

PS. For updates about new posts, sites I find useful and the occasional rant you can follow me on Twitter. You are also most welcome to subscribe to the RSS-feed.

Joel Abrahamsson

Joel Abrahamsson

I'm a passionate web developer and systems architect living in Stockholm, Sweden. I work as CTO for a large media site and enjoy developing with all technologies, especially .NET, Node.js, and ElasticSearch. Read more

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