All Packt ebooks are $5

I was supposed to write a book for them. Even though they refer to people as experts, table of contents and page count is given up front and is hardly negotiable, so I decided to not proceed. Instead I reviewed the book written by someone else and I'm confident they are not a publisher worth working with. Even though I tried my best as a reviewer the outcome was at best mediocre. Language review is done after the book is done, so it's hard to focus on the content. Half of my comments were ignored because they would cause major rewrites (as a reviewer I was contacted after initial drafts of multiple chapters were completed). And the only payment is a copy of reviewed book.

I don't think these books are worth even $5.

Skip the Packt books and get 'Machine learning for hackers' from O'Reilly.

I got a proposal to review one yesterday, was already a little concerned that a vagrant config on github made me ideal for reviewing a cloudera handbook. If the review isn't taken seriously I'll pass, thanks for the heads up :)

There are some comments about the quality of the books, let me share my opinion.

When a book is written for Packt (this is my experience):

1) The author submits his draft chapters to reviewers (there are two or three reviewers per book) - and they provide feedback. The author then has to address all comments from the reviewers, either to correct something (or to make it clearer and understandable) or to reply why it was not corrected. And this goes back and forth until everything is sorted out.

2) After that, technical editors review all chapters and if they feel that something may not be clear enough to the reader or it may have to be double-checked by the author, they will contact him and he'll have to update his drafts again.

3) Then, when the technical editors finish their thing and provide pre-final copies of the chapters, the author has to proofread everything, in order to make sure that everything is as it should be. If the author finds that something is not right he sends feedback to the editors.

You can see that there are many people involved on Packt's side, and (in my case) every one of them cares about quality. At the end of the book the author is even contacted to give an opinion on the quality of the technical editors he was working with.

I know this because I recently authored a book for Packt, named "OAuth 2.0 Identity and Access Management Patterns". It was released few weeks ago.

About the book, I posted an announcement on my blog: http://blog.thisismartin.com/book-oauth-2-dot-0-identity-and...

It is really sad if someone who doesn't know English well accepts an offer from Packt, as I can see in the comments here - there are some cases like that. I hope that they will improve in their selection of authors.

Another gem I'd like to point out is the book "Infinispan Data Grid Platform". It was my first purchase at Packt, thorough and well written.