News

Head First C# – the top-selling C# book on Amazon!

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C# bestsellers on Amazon 14-Mar-2008

Remember back in January, when Tim O’Reilly blogged about great Bookscan numbers for Head First C#?

Well, Bookscan numbers don’t always match what you see on Amazon.com. Our intrepid little book has been clawing its way up the Amazon.com sales ranks. It was in the #2 position on the C# bestseller list for the last month. But when I checked a few minutes ago, it was at the top of the list!

This is a huge deal for us — it’s definitely a high-water mark for the book. And what’s really cool is that Head First C# is picking up steam. Its Amazon sales rank was under 500 all day yesterday, which means that it was one of the top 500 books sold by Amazon.com. (Not the top 500 tech books — the top 500 books.) Typically, books sell the most in the first few months, and Head First C# had a strong start out of the gate. But one of our friends at O’Reilly let us know a few days ago that we’re selling better than ever (when you discount the backorders that had to be filled, which always skew the first month’s results).

And Head First PMP is picking up steam, too! It’s been holding onto the #2 spot for PMP exam prep books, and it’s really been gaining over the last few months.

Now, Jenny and I aren’t all about sales. But we are all about helping people learn, and we see these numbers as a real win.

Head First C# details on Amazon 14-Mar-2008

Speaking, training and writing

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Training saves your kneecaps

We’ve been keeping ourselves busy! What’s that? You want to know more? Well, certainly. We’ve got lots of news:

  • Jenny and I are doing some guest blogging on the Head First Labs website, talking about what it’s like writing a Head First book (and whatever else we feel like talking about). I’ll be doing the posts this week, starting with one called “How We Made Head First C# Different”. I’ll probably get a little more technical near the end of the week — there’s only so much anyone wants to read about writing books. (Or is there?)
  • We’ve put up a new training page, because we’ve been getting a lot of questions about training. It’s a list of the various courses we offer on project management and software development. Right now, we’re mainly concentrating on training corporate teams — we’ll go into a company and do a few days of training for a team. We’ve been getting an increasing number of inquiries about putting together classes that are open to the public, though. If you’re interested in that, please drop us a note using our contacts page and we’ll let you know the next time we’re offering one.
  • Last week we were invited to do our “Why Projects Fail” talk for the PMINYC Breakfast Roundtable. After the talk, one of the audience members came up to me to thank us for doing a presentation that wasn’t boring. I thought that was pretty cool! Anyway, here are the slides from the talk.
  • We’ve been doing our “Why Projects Fail” talk at companies around town. If you work at a company in New York City and want some insight into why projects fail, you’ve got a brown-bag lunch program (or some other kind of program where your company brings speakers in to do a talk), and you can get a reasonably-sized audience together, get in touch with us — we’re usually happy to come in and do it as part of our New York outreach program. It’s generally pretty fun, and a good way to take your mind off of the job for an hour.

2007-10-09 presentation screenshot

News from the trenches

~ Andrew Stellman ~ Leave a comment

Reading the news

Hey, we’re super-busy, so I’ll have to keep this short and sweet. But Jenny and I have some news, and we wanted to share it with you.

  1. We’re in the home stretch on Head First C#. We should be done with the manuscript in the next couple of weeks, which means that it should be in stores sometime in November (if we understand the production schedule correctly).
  2. We’re doing a talk tomorrow at a NYC SPIN / PMINYC meeting. It’s a variant of our “Why Projects Fail” talk — we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback about it, so it should be fun. Unfortunately, registration has closed for it — it’s sold out — but we’ll post slides afterwards.
  3. There was just a great article published on Inc. Magazine’s technology site that quotes us pretty extensively. We had a good talk with the author, Renee Oricchio, and she really got a good sense of what we were saying. It’s called “Getting In-house Software Shops Back on Track”.

Sorry about the quick update – we know we’re phoning it in, but we’ll be more chatty once the book’s out the door.