The amazing guys at Wiley Books (and more especifically Kit and Colleen!) simply rock! I got to meet Kit at the Linux World Conference this year, and after talking for a while about Ubuntu and the new books coming out on the subject, I asked him if his organization offered any type of sponsorship in the form of giving out books. Kit was more than eager to offer me his sponsorship, and one email and a few days later, he put me directly in contact with Colleen who pretty much told me to order anything from their catalogues.

Now, since I am part of a total of 53 Open Source users at the Northern NJ MySQL Meetup group and 43 members of the Ubuntu Brazilian Portuguese Translators, I used to buy (out of my pocket) “prizes” to give out to our users as a means to get them motivated, as well as a token of my appreciation for their efforts in given back to the Open Source communities. This sponsorship will allow me to reach out to more people and won’t weigh as much in my pocket at the end of the month.

I emailed Colleen my list this Tuesday late afternoon with a small note that pretty much said: “since I will be attending another expo this coming Saturday, would you be able to send them to me by Friday?” Thursday I received 2 boxes with a total of 20 books in the mail!!! These guys rock!!!

I have received and will bring with me to give out 5 “Linux Bible: Boot Up to Fedora, KNOPPIX, Debian, SUSE, Ubuntu , and 7 Other Distributions, 2006 Edition” books as prizes at the Trenton Computer Festival! I have also gotten a box with 300 CDS which should make for a very interesting day! :)

The other books, “Beginning MySQL”, “Professional PHP5”, and “Beginning PHP5” I’ll be distributing at the next MySQL Meetup next week.

To the Wiley Organization (and Kit and Colleen), my most sincere gratitude!