Just wanted to say that my shiny new copy of "Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming" arrived today. This is the long-awaited book from Mitchel Sellers and is apparently co-authored in part by Shaun Walker's ever-present head shot.  I've only thumbed through it so far but I must say that it appears to be exactly the book I wished for when I first encountered DNN.   Pre-Order and be one of the first to receive....  This book has been a while coming.  I had to close out the book purchase in our budget.  After digging up my notes it turns out that I put the book on my "must purchase" list back on 1-22-2008 and placed the pre-order on 3-13-2008.  At that time the book was slated for release on 4-21-2008.  It finally made it to me on 2-23-2009.

Available at Amazon.com

 
The long wait is understandable since the book is aimed directly at DNN 5.x and 5.0 was only just released on 12-24-2008 (and 5.0.1 is due for release...er...today?  Hasn't happened, yet).  It's easy to imagine how sections of the the book were already written and then updated over time as changes were made to the then-unreleased DNN 5.  Evidence of such updates:  Page 1 states "As of this writing, the DotNetNuke.com website has published links for downloading versions 4.8.4, 4.70, 4.62, and 3.3.7".  Then, on page 3, we read "Version 4.9.0: released September 2008...".  (Someone missed updating page 1 when adding that bit to page 3.)  I'd hate to have to write a book on a moving target such as DNN.  Hopefully any code inconsistencies with the actual 5.0 release are minor but, if there are, I certainly will understand.

 
In The Book
Beyond those first few pages are a wealth of code samples and at least one or two "mysterious" DNN topics laid bare.  Newcomers to DNN will really benefit from the "creating, packaging and deploying a module" topic.  All of the book's subject matter appears to be presented in a "let's build something" approach which happens to be my favorite -- instant gratification!  I was even happily thumbing through the appendix noting "User Creation" code sampes (in both VB and C#) as well as "manifest options"  (the manifest has previously been an utterly under-documented subject IMO).   I don't think that I've anticipated reading a technical book this much since I bought my first "Macromedia Flash" book over ten years ago.

Nice job, Mitchel -- I think the DNN dev community just got a great new resource!

-mamlin