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Comment by hashtag-til | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know/recommend the author?

Sometimes I feel Packt books are not the highest quality. Happy for anyone to disagree and tell me a different impression.

I was reached out by Packt a few times on LinkedIn with something like: "hey, if you want to write about stuff, let us know".

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My experience with them was less than favorable. We started our book journey with them but had to abandon them because their editorial team & processes were so bad. Their insistence on artificially inflating the book's thickness with larger fonts was just the final straw.

We were fortunate to work with Manning & O’Reilly to complete our book. The quality, professionalism, and integrity we saw with them and the contrast with Packt was night and day.

Did you have to pay a fee to get out of the contract with Packt?

No, we tried escalating the issues on those practices to the exec team, explicitly requesting a change in policies to enhance the quality of our book. The middle managers we were dealing with simply threw in the towel after that.

PS: This was several years ago, and the policies may have degraded even further since then.

Same here. Packt's business model is quantity over quality. Some of the books are a copy paste of the official documentation with minimal changes. And there is no depth at all. I stay away from Packt books, but if there is a recommendation, can read this one.

I was an (unpaid) technical reviewer for a Packt book on Arduino back in 2012. After a couple of chapters I realized that the book made little sense and was mostly plagiarized. It took more effort and conflict than I liked to convince Packt that this was a problem and couldn't merely be fixed by editing. I definitely would not be a Packt reviewer again.

What's the incentive for donating your time in such a role? Name on the cover?

Helping the community...

> What's the incentive for donating your time in such a role? Name on the cover?

Name in the book as the technical reviewer, and a copy of the physical book if it goes to print.

+1 for staying away from Packt. I was once part of the review process for a draft. It was poorly written by someone who clearly wasn’t a domain expert. The published version was just as bad as the draft, irrespective of the feedback given by all the reviewers.

+1 on the questionable quality of content by Packt. It's generally not the highest quality content from whatever little experience I have. Most of the books that I read had outright wrong examples, that did not even compile. Content always seemed rushed and superfluous with no real thought given to coherency.

I downloaded a few books ~5 years ago and the quality wasn't that great, it was like reading a reworded tutorial in a random website.

Checking the author is a good call

I think so too. But I have also read good Packt books, it depends on the author.

I got asked to write a book by Packt as a lead author with two years experience in a junior position. This was a (badly) paid role of like 800 GBP or something. Take from that what you will...

Yeah, I was similarly approached (on LinkedIn) to write a book on a topic I'm nowhere near an expert nor vocal about it in social media, etc.

I'm not really in social media at all, so I take the approach as a cold-call for writing a book, which seems like a red flag to me.

Packt is hit & miss but some have decent authors and good reviews.

"Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn" by Sebastian Raschka et al.

"In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow" by Matthew Topol.

> Does anyone know/recommend the author?

Haven't heard of him before, but did get a little giggle from the website's almost 'bizspeak' description of a tool they have. It's so vague I have to give it credit.

https://ledin.com/real-time-simulation-protocol/

It's a broken link so can't even see what it does.

IME Packt is very poor. I had one excellent book, one okay one and a whole lot of trash. The entire brand is on my Do Not Buy list.

> Sometimes I feel Packt books are not the highest quality.

Well, I have observed sometimes they are not the lowest quality. So on any subscription service I try to filter out Packt books if possible.

from what I gathered, pakt tends to be a free for all. manning offers a similar subscription service and I've found that while the selection is smaller, the quality is much better.

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