I can finally answer the question, “When is the book coming out?”. The answer: Today. The Alfresco Developer Guide is now available for immediate shipping from Packt‘s web site.

There are a lot of people who made this thing happen including an awesome team of colleagues at Optaros, the entire Alfresco crew, the Packt team, and the support of my family. I’ve expressed my thanks individually in the acknowledgments and I hope I haven’t left anyone out.

I’m pretty excited how the book turned out. One of my roles as the Director of the ECM Practice is to get our consultants and our clients up to speed on open source CMS technology like Alfresco. I tried to organize the book in the same way I cover these topics in-person so the book flows just like it would if you and I were sitting in a room and you said, “I’ve been poking around with Alfresco on my own but now I’m ready to really start to do something with it.” I start with core fundamentals (content modeling, actions, behaviors, extractors) and gradually work “outward” through web client customizations, web scripts, advanced workflow, WCM, and security.

The book’s title has “developer guide” in it for a reason: It is more of a tutorial than it is an exhaustive reference. I figured with resources available like the wiki, the forums, and the source code, it was more important and helpful to step you through real-world examples.

My hope is that this book flattens the learning curve for everyone. And maybe in some way it will encourage companies that feel stuck in their currently legacy CMS to explore options.