Hi Xavier,

The person at Packt who is responsible for marketing and arranges for reviewer copies for Using CiviCRM is on vacation till next week. He should be able to provide a complimentary reviewer copy to you.

The publisher is interested in facilitating reviews of the book, and will provide free copies to reviewers. If anyone else interesting in writing a review of the book, please contact me (joe dot murray at jmaconsulting dot biz) or Brian (brian at lcdservices dot biz).

Cheers,

Joe

Thanks for your comment. As you can imagine, Brian and I don't get to decide whether Amazon makes all of the books in Packt's catalog  available on Kindle. ;) It does seem like a good deal though to have unlimited access to everything Packt publishes (http://packtlib.packtpub.com/subscriptions?). They put out a lot of Drupal and Joomla! books, and it's often useful to compare the way different authors treat the same topic or feature.

Our book touches on a bit of what is upcoming in 3.4/4.0 but the images and instructions are for the most part 3.2, with a bit on 3.3.

There is a big chapter on how an organization can better achieve its mission by developing a good CRM strategy and good and realistic implementation plan for it. This chapter is targetted towards Executive Directors and the people in charge of different functions in non-profits/NGOs as well as those who work in IT. There is also a review of how to put together a fundraising plan. In both cases, general best practices in the non-profit and advocacy world are made concrete by explaining how they work in CiviCRM.

The bulk of Using CiviCRM leads the reader through how to accomplish tasks using CiviCRM. We hope we've done a good job, but that's for you and other CiviCRM users to judge. Certainly the reviewers who gave us detailed feedback on each chapter thought we did a good job. A big call-out has to go to Eileen McNaughton here. The forum goddess gave us an incredible number of useful practical suggestions including some of her tips, ideas on best practices, and helped keep us clear and understandable. Brian and I take responsibility of course for any deficiencies or errors in the final text.

We hope Using CiviCRM will be a useful reference for those using, administering, or considering CiviCRM. We think that it's a vote of confidence for the CiviCRM community and project that a commercial publisher decided to put out a book on CiviCRM. We'd like to thank Packt for the editorial help and assistance they have given us in producing this 464 page volume over the past year, and hope that it helps more organizations take advantage of all CiviCRM has to offer.