They never fixed the many factual inaccuracies before it went to print.
I don't think they create paper books anymore. Is that incorrect?
Just not from them directly.
I support independent publishing and small publishers, but as a consumer, you need to build trust in the quality of the content across the board, not just a handful. If I see a book from Springer or O’Reilly, I know I can at least trust some baseline expectations from a book - true there are some bad apples as well, but they are at least edible unlike Manning/Packt where I got a load of shit instead of an Apple for $29.
I used to be a big O'Reilly fan, but the quality of their content seemed to go down 5 or so years ago. It seemed like they were at the peak of churning out books on every topic imaginable - I think they stretched themselves too thin. They seemed to go from great to mediocre overnight. When they closed their online shop a year or so back, and really started pushing Safari hard I stopped getting anything from them.
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.
For example their blender book is absolute trash and waste of time.
https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/blender-3d-ba...
Their model in the middle of the book could be made in 5mins. And most of the book author writes about history of animation and other offtopics.
https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/hardware_and_creative...
- 80% off a topic everyday
- $5 selected ebooks every other week or so
- $5 all ebooks few times a year
Why would they offer such steep discounts if the books are of high quality?
For me, I never even bother to waste time looking even at $5 (or even if free) since 99.9% of them are really just crap.
- 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.
> 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.