I've had a lot of fun over the past several days tracking the progress of online retail availability for the first developer.* book, Software Conflict 2.0: The Art and Science of Software Engineering [1], by computing pioneer Robert L. Glass. A few weeks ago we sent the "metadata" for our title to Ingram, our distributor/wholesaler in the book trade. This data includes things like the title, ISBN, author, price, availability date, cover image, etc. Ingram sends this information on our behalf to the "Books In Print" agencies in the US and UK, and from there this data makes its way electronically around the world and the web.

This past week Software Conflict 2.0 showed up on Amazon US [2], Amazon UK [3], Barnes & Noble [4], Books-A-Million [5], Powell's [6], and a bunch of other places. Some independent booksellers on sites like Alibris, Half.com, and Amazon Marketplace are selling the book also, often at a markup over the cover price! As you can imagine, we're pretty excited about all this. It's funny, the book became more "real" for me when I saw it for sale in the major online bookstores than when I was holding the first copy from the printer in my hand. (It's a beautiful book, by the way, thanks to the hard work of our book designer Giles Hoover at ospreyDesign [7].)

If you've been thinking about or planning to purchase a copy of our book, now's a great time to do it. We really want to build up our sales rank on Amazon US [8] and Amazon UK [9] as much as possible as quickly as possible. Pre-orders are a great way to do that. If you prefer to purchase elsewhere, that's great too. You can also walk into any brick-and-mortar bookstore in the US or UK and order a copy (ISBN 0977213307). At the time of this writing, we're less than two weeks away from the book's official release, so your wait won't be long. We really appreciate your support.

Update: I just uploaded a whole set of new pages [Array] about the book (see the right side menu on that page), including the Table of Contents [10], credits [11], ordering information [12], and the whole story behind the book [13].

Best,
Dan