The Mobile Presenter

I attend and speak at a lot of tech conferences. Over time, I noticed that some presentations work better than others. This triggered me to look into the theory behind presentations, especially since nobody ever told me how to do it - I was only copying what everybody else seemed to be doing.

Eventually, I came across Garr Reynolds and his Presentation Zen approach. These days, you can see more and more highly visual presentations, obviously inspired by the Presentation Zen approach, being given at conferences - but mostly for keynotes and other non-technical talks.

The typical tech talk in 2012, however, is still dominated by bullet points. But it doesn't have to be this way. Part of the motivation for the blog you're reading was to help spread the message There is a better way to do presentations! to the tech and geek communities, which led to the "Presenting for Geeks" workshops, which led to "Presenting for Geeks" - The Ebook.

So I am very happy to announce that my first ebook, Presenting for Geeks, is now available for purchase from the Amazon Kindle Store (US, UK, Germany).

Update: A German translation, Präsentieren für Geeks, is now also available from the Amazon Kindle Store.

As the title suggests, this book is mainly aimed at the average techie or geek who needs to give a presentation about a technical topic. The basics discussed in the book are applicable to any type of presentation, but it does also cover geek-specific topics such as presenting source code and running software demos in a terminal window.

Presenting for Geeks doesn't offer a completely new approach to presentations. Instead, it brings the concepts that have already been proven to work in other contexts to the world of tech presentations. Presentation Zen is often misunderstood and reduced to use photos. In this book, I'll show you that the approach goes beyond that and that it is perfectly applicable to technical presentations.

The geek community has already noticed the trend towards more visual presentations. Some speakers have embraced the idea and others are starting to copy it but haven't fully grokked the concept yet. I see Presenting for Geeks as my small contribution to this ongoing move towards more engaging, more visual technical presentations. My dream is that in a few years from now, we can attend a technical presentation and expect not to be bothered by slide upon slide filled with bullet points. Let's make it happen - we're not that far off.

P.S. Both Amazon and Leanpub will let you download an excerpt from the book's beginning, so that you can "try before you buy". Also, JAXenter posted an excerpt from chapter 3, What to do when things go wrong.

"Presenting for Geeks - The Ebook" by Dirk Haun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.