New book in town: vSphere Quick Start Guide

Months ago I shared an idea on Twitter about starting a “super blog”. This “super blog” should have contained the top articles of some of the best VMware or virtualization bloggers around. I asked myself what the added value would be and came to the conclusion that there already were many “super blogs” around. Although the “super blog” idea died a slow death the urge to collaborate with others on a challenging project still lived on. (Although Stephen Foskett picked it up and created Gestalt IT at the time.)

This is when the idea of a book series was born, which I for obvious reasons did not share with the twitter community. This book, and hopefully the rest of the following books, is written by six well known VMware community members. I don’t think they need further introduction so here are there names: Bernie Baker(thanks Chad for the tip), Thomas Bryant III, Stu Radnidge, Dave Mishchenko, Alan Renouf and myself of course.

The original idea was to publish a series of short topics, deep-dives, with each book limited to 150 pages, pocket size, sold at a minimum price and completely “diy”. For those unfamiliar with the term “diy” it means “do it yourself”. In other words we do not have a publisher helping us or funding it. We also don’t have a marketing budget, so we are relying on you guys to spread the word and we will be relying on Lulu.com for distributing/selling it.

When we started outlining our first book Ron Oglesby gave us the opportunity to rewrite the Quick Start Guide he and his team at RapidApp published in March 2007. We all agreed that this would be a good start of the series. Thanks again Ron! Of course this book will exceed the limit we agreed on of 150 pages, but it is worth it. We hope to get it done before VMworld and bring a couple of copies to VMworld but the clock is ticking fast and we are not there yet. We will keep you informed!

I just hope we can get all you guys as excited about new technology and VMware products in general as we are!