It's been a few months since my last post, but rest assured, I have not been slacking.  Well, I have been Slacking...on Slack.  Join the conversation by clicking here to request an invitation!

But more importantly, I have been working on a much larger writing project.  Starting way back in February, Phil Wicklund (@philwicklund) and I began writing a book for Sitecore developers.  After 7 months and countless hours of writing, reviewing, rewriting, compiling, debugging, rewriting, testing, reading, rereading and proofing...

...I can finally say that the book is complete!

The book is called Professional Sitecore 8 Development: A Complete Guide to Solutions and Best Practices and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

The book starts at the very beginning: installing Sitecore and setting up your development environment.  It continues by diving in and building your first component!  Then comes the primer on templates and content structure.  Once we have the basics down, we start talking about larger architectural concepts and introduce Helix, Sitecore's set of overall design principles for developing Sitecore solutions.  Using these principles, we start creating basic modules, refactoring them over the course of a few chapters, improving the design along the way.

Some of the other key concepts we cover are:

• Front-end development techniques
• Unit testing in a Sitecore world
• Configuring and working with Search in Sitecore
• Customizing Web Forms for Marketers
• Using Events, Goals and Outcomes
• Extending the xDB Contact
• Extending Engagement Plans
• Working with PowerShell Extensions
• Customizing the Experience Editor
• And more!  :)

The chapter on PowerShell Extensions was graciously contributed by Michael West (@michaelwest101)!

Mike Reynolds (@mike_i_reynolds), Nick Wesselman (@techphoria414) and Kamruz Jaman (@jammykam - you know, the guy that wrote Unicorn...) were our technical reviewers.

We were also very honored when the legendary John West (@cmsvortex), the only recipient of the Lifetime Sitecore MVP award, agreed to contribute a foreword!

Phil and I are very excited about this book and hope all of you find it useful!

It should be released in December 2016, just in time for the holidays and is already available for pre-order on Amazon.

Happy Sitecore trails, my friends!