Alfresco Developer Guide is Potts’ first book, published in October last year. His book was judged best written out of a set of 6 nominated titles, including books about Drupal, Ext JS, JavaScript, and SOA.
“I am excited and honored to win the award,” said Potts, “especially because I know there were several popular and well-written books among the finalists.”
Judges praised the book for “providing a strong balance of background, actionable items, and wisdom” and bringing a complex, challenging topic “down to earth”.
The winner receives a $1000 cash prize and an engraved Packt Author of the Year 2009 trophy.
Any Packt author who published a book in 2008 was eligible for the 2009 award. Six finalists were selected on the basis of an open vote, where readers could nominate their favorite eligible book. Packt then sent copies of these books to expert judges, who gave their opinions and evaluation of each title. The judges’ verdict put the Alfresco Developer Guide on top.
Packt strives to be a rewarding publisher to work with, and a first choice for first time and veteran technical book authors.
“We’re pleased that this award gives us another chance to reward and thank our authors for their hard work,” said David Barnes, Packt Acquisition Editor and organizer of the award. “We give our authors excellent royalty terms and all the assistance we can to help them with writing and then to market their work, so that the whole process is as rewarding as possible. Most of our authors write in their limited free time alongside demanding full time jobs and this award gives us another, more fun way to reward and thank our authors.”
The Packt Author of the Year Award aims to acknowledge and reward authors whose books are written to an exceptional standard, provide the most practical and useful assistance to readers, and that enrich the tech community as a whole.
The other finalists for the award were:
* Aaron Winborn for Drupal Multimedia
* Matt Butcher for Learning Drupal 6 Module Development
* Shea Fredrick, Colin Ramsay and Steve "Cutter" Blades jointly for Learning Ext JS
* Stoyan Stefanov for Object-Oriented JavaScript
* Vincenzo Caselli, Binildas A. Christudas, Malhar Barai jointly for Service Oriented Architecture with Java
Packt is always keen to attract new authors to write new tech books. Anybody interested in becoming a Packt author, and perhaps winning the award in a future year,should visit http://authors.packtpub.com and give Packt their details.
