Packt Publishing, the company responsible for bringing my book, "Mastering Magento," to the market, has announced that they are celebrating the publication of their 1,000th title. This is a pretty remarkable feat considering the company started publishing books only 8 years ago.Anyone who's worked with open source software, such as Magento, WordPress, OpenCart, JQuery and others is undoubtedly familiar with one or more Packt titles. I have several Packt books on my office bookshelf. The appeal of Packt titles is the clarity of the writing, layout and examples.

Special Packt Offer

To mark this milestone, Packt is offering a free eBook download to anyone already registered at www.packtpub.com, or who registers before September 30, 2012. That's not a bad deal, considering the vast choice of titles available. This could be a great opportunity for programmers, designers and webmasters to pick up that one extra book they've thought about buying, but just haven't yet done so.The library will be open for one free download for a whole week! Go to www.packtpub.com now to register.

An Open Source Contributor

Packt Publishing is also an avid contributor to the Open Source community, having contributed over $400,000 to open source developers and projects. The company regularly hosts surveys on preferred open source projects.As a proponent of niche marketing, it's interesting that a company has been so successful aiming at a sub-section of the computer marketplace. But that's why they are so successful: by concentrating on open source software, the company is better able to develop titles in a manner that produces books of special quality. Packt editors (and I do speak from experience here) understand how to guide authors toward producing books appealing to the open source audience.As an author of a Packt title, I'm excited to see the firm succeed. The more resources we, as web engineers, have at our disposal — especially in this rapidly evolving industry — the better we can serve our clients and our projects.Congratulations, Packt.