Not the OP but have avoided Packt books for years: I find them to typically exhibit quite low quality of writing and I assert without proof that they lack the rigor in the editing process that more 'serious' publishers have. Also I think it's pretty easy to become a Packt author; some people I've worked with and a friend have been approached by them. Typically I only buy Manning or O'Reilly but I've read a few garbage titles from the latter of late so I suspect that might not hold for much longer. It'll be interesting to see if perceived quality becomes a market differentiator or if tech books at some point become unprofitable.
My impression from everyone I talked to is that Packt does not care about quality or accuracy, but aims to print a book as fast as possible. I also spoke to an author of a Packt book who said they'd never work with them again.
I'd also note that I often find Packt books which don't even spell the name of the topic they're covering correctly, right on the cover.
I avoid them after they asked me to write about a topic that I didn't even have on my resume. I also found the quality of the books that I had purchased to not be very high.
> Packt is planning to publish a book titled as 'SQLAlchemy cookbook' which would be a 300 page book and in the process of seeking potential authors to work on this book I also read through your resume [Link]. It is evident that you have an expertise in this area and as such seems to be an ideal candidate to author this book for us.
They linked to my actual resume that had 0 mention of SQLAlchemy. At the time, I had also graduated less than a year before, which was clearly mentioned on my resume as well.
OP here, lots of reasons. I reviewed a book called "Node Security".
- The level of technical quality of the book was not what I would expect for ~$40.
- I was arguably naive and under qualified (although probably qualified enough for the level the book ended up being), having some Node and some security experience.
- The author was probably more naive and no more qualified, having no security experience.
- The book ended up becoming a list of tutorials about how to use certain libraries for authentication/etc in Node apps.
- My main feedback was that I felt an additional last chapter should be added, that showed how to deploy a node app behind Nginx with a basic security setup in production. I felt this was in-line with the very (in my opinion overly) practical nature of the book, I also felt that "deploy behind Nginx" or something along those lines was one of the most obvious things to do in terms of security, and a real quick win. They made it clear that adding a chapter, however short, was out of the question.
- Really the only thing I was encouraged to do was to test the code examples to make sure they worked. I did find a security vulnerability in one of them, and that was fixed, but that was probably the most meaningful change I had an impact on.
A few years ago, they asked me to be a tech reviewer and the compensation was a credit/bio, a copy of the book, and an ebook of any other of their books. No money. I took that as a sign they weren't serious about getting a good review.
Yeah, I'll add that I've bought quite a few packt books (mostly because I like cryptic things and they have crazy sales). Avoid them, Manning and Apress tend to be much better. Honestly I tend towards textbooks anymore...
