Wow! Great Philipp, congratulations! :D

con'grats Philipp.

I just got my copy and tis freakin awsome. Easy to read and a wealth of information. a must read book by startups that use Google apps!!

"Only 1 left in stock--order soon."

Wow this looks like a great book. Hats off to you, Philipp!

Is there any reason its currently unavailable on Amazon UK?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Google-Apps-Hacks-Philipp-Lenssen/dp/059651588X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209575421&sr=8-1

The cover looks great! :)
Congratz Philipp.

Mambo, I'll ask about Amazon UK and get back here.

On Amazon.de, the book can't be found looking for "Google Apps Hacks" but it works if you enter "Google Office Hacks"...

amazon.com : $29.99 (actually $19.79)
amazon.fr : 14.28 € = $22.20 :-)

amazon.de: 29,99 € = $46,63

Congrats Philipp!

Nice cover design.

Congratulations Philipp I hope this one is a big success.

Congrats! I've got two copies so far. I bought a copy at Web 2.0 at the O'Reilly booth last week, plus there was my Amazon pre-order. :)

Just ordered my copy. Thanks!

This will be great for me to learn some of the more advanced things that can be done with some of these apps, and a great resource for teaching new employees and clients how to leverage Google Apps.

Congratulations Philipp!!!

I hope i'll have the chance to read it one day...
(In the mean-time. I can't.. because my visa is vaild only in
Israel.. :( )

Hope I get my copy soon. I just read your sample chapter. It sounds very interessting!

Congrats, I have never been into non-fiction hard cover books, they are so clumpsy... so I will not order one, but I have to say it looks quite interesting and it seems you have done a neat job.

congrast!

Congrats, Philipp, on your new book, and on the quinquennial of Google Blogoscoped!

> Congrats, I have never been into non-fiction hard cover
> books, they are so clumpsy

It's a soft cover book actually...

Congratulations Philipp!!! Are you going to be doing a world signing tour for your book? :)

<< Mambo, I'll ask about Amazon UK and get back here. >>

Cheers Philipp.

Congrats Philipp ... yea, when does the world-side author's tour kick off?!? ;-)

Congratulations!
I'll order one when Amazon UK gets some is stock :-)

When the only two RSS feeds on my iGoogle Homepage are Make and Blogoscoped, I just enjoyed a rather baffling few seconds of.. "Wait.. Didn't I just click on Blogoscoped?!!"

When Websites Collide!!!

Congradulations

(BTW) The contest says you have to post by April 28th tot win the book and today's the 30th

Avrohom, below the contest note in bold there's another note that the deadline has been extended, so there's still time until May 7...

Congrats.

I finished reading the book yesterday, there are some really interesting stuff in there. :)

Congrats Philipp
I'm ordering my copy now :)

Excellent news, Philipp! Seems like it's bound to be a success, but nevertheless, congratulations and good luck!

Cool. Congratulations!

I am reading this book. Wonderful work. I plan a year to reserach this book.

Matt Cutts wrote a post about the book.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/review-google-apps-hacks/

(Thanks for the pointer Colin!)

You've been digged! Once again, I wish you luck with this book, Philipp.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Matt_Cutts_reviews_Google_Apps_Hacks

Mentioned on Lifehacker:

http://lifehacker.com/386477/grab-a-free-chapter-of-google-apps-hacks

It's worth noting that some parts from the sample chapter (hack 30) are already outdated: Google Presentations no longer offers the option to save a presentation as HTML (ZIP).

Hack #34 says that "as of this writing, Google did not offer a way to view presentations on a mobile phone", but you can view presentations if you use an iPhone.

Congratulations, I can't wait to get a copy.

The preface of the book says that there's an errata at
http://www.makezine.com/go/gappshacks/
but that page is returning a 404.

Let me forward that to O'Reilly, thanks Roger.

The errata page is here, maybe above URL is supposed to redirect there:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515881/errata/

Sorry I'm late (thought internet was down, realised router was unplugged 3 days later...)

Congratulations! Judging by the comments on O'Reilly and here its awesome, and I'll definatly buy it when it comes available around these parts.

Good to see your hard work has finally paid off!

(Roger, the link has been fixed now.)

Just out of curiousity Philipp, what made you choose the term 'Hacks'? Aren't hacks normally things that goed beyond what a program is meant to do, by using flaws in (for example) it's code?

Probably this: http://www.oreilly.com/hacks/

(I don't like using this word, "tricks" seems more appropriate).

<< Aren't hacks normally things that goed beyond what a program is meant to do, by using flaws in (for example) it's code? >>

I don't think so. I think you're confusing "hacking" with "criminal hacking" (or "cracking"). I think of a "hack" as a way to achieve something but not in the way it was originally intended or designed to work.

e.g. At work, we often "hack" our code to make it do something because it's quicker than doing it "properly".

(You can cut down a tree properly using a saw and climbing its branches or you can hack it to bits using an axe. One way is a lot neater and requires better planning and design but, either way, you end up with no tree...)

Tony

Yeah, that's kind of what I meant. I know that there's non-malicious hacking. Anyway, lol, I'm sure the title doesn't let down the book in any way!! :-D

Dito what Tony said. I think of a hack as an interesting way to get something to work even when it may require unusual ways that may not be native to the thing you're working with. This is also the name of the line of books by O'Reilly. We played around with different titles but all had "Hacks" in them. Depending on the article in the book, sometimes the word "hack", sometimes "tip", sometimes "trick"*, sometimes "tutorial" or "workaround" or "introduction" would be more correct, and sometimes they are also probably either as good (and we used different wordings in the book and the backcover, and also the cover), but in references or headlines the word hack is used to give the book a neat organization.

*One article for instance explains how to export Google Analytics stats into XML and then load this up in a webpage and visualize it using Ajax + Canvas. Calling this a tip or trick would be wrong somehow I think... somehow I think of a trick to involve much less programming than is in that article. Tutorial might also be wrong, as traditionally perhaps a tutorial should focus just on one technology (like just <Canvas>).

One thing I was initially wondering is whether the title Google Apps Hacks would start confusion as Google experts might think it's about Google Apps for Your Domain (nowadays just called Google Apps). Then again by now Google also released the Google App Engine so they too start to use the word in a more generic way, and we also included the word "Applications" on the title to try better ensure it's understood rightly. Now I'm happy with the title, so far feedback was that it's not misunderstood to mean Google Apps for Your Domain (though one person at FriendFeed almost thought it was about the Google App Engine :)).

"Then again by now Google also released the Google App Engine so they too start to use the word in a more generic way."

Yes, but Google App Engine was created to open Google Apps to 3rd party developers. It's even listed as a feature in Google Apps:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html

I don't see such a strong relation. There are overlaps, for sure, but Google Apps For Your Domain didn't interest me from a developer perspective as it's more aimed at business or people managing user account, but the Google App Engine does interest me to create chats, to send mail, or to do a bunch of other potential projects.

"Organizations use a variety of applications specific to their market, if not totally unique to their specific needs. With the preview of the Google App Engine we're providing a 'test drive' of a new development platform. Google App Engine will allow organizations to build their own apps, restricted to just their users, integrated with the admin console, served from custom URLs at their domain, and hosted on Google's infrastructure. Get started today with a free preview of the Google App Engine development platform."

"By default, when you create an application with Google App Engine, any pages which require authentication will prompt visitors to supply Google account credentials, such as a Gmail account. However, you may want to build an application which is only available to one organization, such as an internal job search tool. In this case, you may configure your application to prompt for account credentials from a specific existing Google Apps domain."

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/admin_features.html

Yes, that is one way to use it, and naturally the Google Apps For Your Domains help page which you're quoting from will only discuss the Google Apps-related stuff you can do with GAE when it discusses GAE. However, there are a multitude of uses that aren't related to Google Apps For Your Domains (now called Google Apps). Have you programmed a couple of sample apps with GAE Ionut? You will notice that you don't need to think of GAE as just for "organizations to build their own apps, restricted to just their users, integrated with the admin console, served from custom URLs at their domain", but that you can do many different other things with it which are equally neat (you don't need to be an organization; you don't need to have existing users you manage; you can use the Google Account, which in itself must have nothing to do with Google Apps For Your Domain; you can send mails via your Gmail account; you don't need to serve it from your own URL, but can use an appspot.com subdomain and so on).

Again, I'm not saying it's not useful in combination with Google Apps For Your Domain, and there are many placed where you will find the overlap described; it's just that this overlap is by far not the only use of the Google App Engine.

I agree, but I only wanted to point to out that there is a connection between App Engine and Google Apps. We'll see if this will be the most important use for App Engine.

> Hack #34 says that "as of this writing, Google did not offer a
> way to view presentations on a mobile phone", but you can
> view presentations if you use an iPhone.

Looks like that bit was written by Brian Jepson. In Hack #07 Philipp clearly states:

<< Opening a word processing document in Google Docs mobile will just show the file as it would appear on a web site. (Presentation files cannot be opened on anything but iPhones at the time of this writing.) >>

Any word from Amazon UK yet?

Wow... I might sell my copy... ;-)

<< 2 used & new available from £94.56 >>

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Google-Apps-Hacks-Philipp-Lenssen/dp/059651588X

The first four chapters (and even more than that) are available at
Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=yqPizaawSzYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22google+apps+hacks%22&client=firefox-a

> I agree, but I only wanted to point to out that there
> is a connection between App Engine and Google Apps.

Yes, and I agree with you too...

> Any word from Amazon UK yet?

Nothing yet, I'll update if I hear anything back. Perhaps for now ordering via Amazon.com is better in the UK though it might cost more shipping and cause more delays?

Well i've seen it on Google Books and it looks great!!!

I'll read some of it.... (I hope it's ok Philipp..)

Thanks Ionut :)

Tony
The price has come down a bit, but I think I'll wait til Amazon sell direct ;-)
<<2 used & new from £70.27>>

it'd be a lot cooler if you offered a full version on google books. call it a bonus for those of us who use Gbooks.

Philipp, I hope you didn't use O'Reilly France to send your books to French users. Because O'Reilly France is now closed.
http://www.oreilly.fr/
Translation:
" Final Closure

The O'Reilly editions have closed permanently.

We are sincerely sorry for the (too) small number of readers who appreciated our titles. "

Amazon UK: in stock!

I've received the book :)