Many Plone community members (including the authors!) have been eagerly awaiting the release of Practical Plone 3: A Beginner's Guide to Building Powerful Websites. The wait is over; Practical Plone 3 is now shipping!

Practical Plone 3 is the first Plone 3 book targted specifically at beginning Plone site builders. Practical Plone 3 weighs in at over 550 pages and includes 21 chapters that cover all major aspects of installing Plone, building a site, customizing it, and putting it into production.

Practical Plone 3, like Plone itself, was a team effort, led by editors Martin Aspeli and Veda Williams. An all-star cast of Plone community members contributed chapters, including: Matt Bowen, Alex Clark, Tom Conklin, David Convent, John DeStefano, Darci Hanning, Sam Knox, Steve McMahon, Ricardo Newbery, Clayton Parker, Jon Stahl and Veda Williams.

Here's the complete table of contents:

Part 1 — Background

1. Introducing Plone

2. Installing Plone

3. A Brief Tour of Plone

Part 2 — I want to…

4. Create Web Pages

5. Add News Items, Events, Links, and Files

6. Structure the Content in My Site

7. Safely Manage Different Versions of Content

8. Delegate Content Management to Other People

9. Manage Approvals and Other Workflow for My Content

10. Show Additional Information to Users and Visitors

11. Automate Tasks with Content Rules

12. Control My Site's Configuration

Part 3 — Now that I've got the basics, I'd like to learn how to…

13. Set up a Repeatable Environment using Buildout

14. Find and Install Add-ons That Expand Plone Functionality

15. Build Forms

16. Create New Content Type

17. Customize Plone

18. Change the Look and Feel

Part 4 — My boss wants me to…

19. Take My Site Live

20. Make It Go Faster

21. Connect to Your LDAP/Active Directory Repository

Sound good? Order Practical Plone 3 now!

Also worth noting: