Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All Packt ebooks are $5

packtpub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 73 posts

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#61

Post by moondowner »

gkwelding wrote: post #45
moondowner wrote: post #17

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…

Can I just ask, as somebody who is currently reviewing a book for Packt on the FuelPHP framework, I've found the actual technical content to be quite good. But the foreword and a bit of background info about FuelPHP at the front seemed like it had been written by another author entirely. Do Packt add in non-technical chapters such as this?

Damn... Sorry for the multiple replies, I should change the HN client app I use on Android.

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#62

Post by judah »

sown wrote: post #46
judah wrote: post #32

I was contacted by Packt yesterday to write a book on KnockoutJS. I am an expert in the subject matter, however, I'm currently working a full time dev job, a part time dev job at nights, and my startup on the weekends. So, I declined. Now that I see some of the comments here about quantity over quality, I'm feeling better about my decision to turn it down.

"...I'm currently working a full time dev job, a part time dev job at nights, and my startup on the weekends." That sounds neat. How did you get a part-time dev job?

My had done training in Israel for RavenDB, the big NoSQL database for .NET.

Earlier this year we reached an agreement where I'd work on RavenDB as a part-time dev job. In particular, I'm porting the RavenDB Management Studio from Silverlight to HTML5, see http://debuggerdotbreak.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/ravendb-stu...

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#63

Post by judah »

welly wrote: post #56
judah wrote: post #32

I was contacted by Packt yesterday to write a book on KnockoutJS. I am an expert in the subject matter, however, I'm currently working a full time dev job, a part time dev job at nights, and my startup on the weekends. So, I declined. Now that I see some of the comments here about quantity over quality, I'm feeling better about my decision to turn it down.

You must love your work!

I do love software dev. Building things is a superpower. :-)

http://judahhimango.com/presentations/startup/#2

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#64

Post by judah »

thauck wrote: post #38
judah wrote: post #32

I was contacted by Packt yesterday to write a book on KnockoutJS. I am an expert in the subject matter, however, I'm currently working a full time dev job, a part time dev job at nights, and my startup on the weekends. So, I declined. Now that I see some of the comments here about quantity over quality, I'm feeling better about my decision to turn it down.

I've authored a Packt book - it isn't of high quality. It was a good experience, but they don't provide the resources needed (help and monetarily) for doing good work.

Yeah. I figured I wouldn't do it for the money, since authoring tech books brings in pennies for the author.

I'd like to do it for career sake. "Hey, I love JS so much, I wrote a book on a popular JS framework."

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#65

Post by monksy »

Some of the books I liked from Packt:

1. Apache Wicket Cookbook [DO NOT BUY THE INSTANT TITLE.. THAT IS A WASTE OF MONEY FOR PRINTED SOURCE] [Also if you want a starter book for Wicket go with Wicket in Action/Depth]

2. High performance PostgresSQL 9

3. Google Guava - I absolutely loved this book and how it presented the material. I know that the doc is out there .. but this presented the information in an easier to consume way. [Its worth the $25+ cost of the ebook]

4. Jasperreports for Java Developers - That was the tutorial I needed. I believe it contained a few minor errors but eh.

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#66

Post by thinkersilver »

I took oppurtunity of the deal and bought books on machine learning and visualization and realized that I unwittingly bought the same book twice:

* Data Visualization with D3.js * Data Visualization with d3.js

There's no way of reveresing this now but I do feel a bit silly.

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#67

Post by call_me_cookie »

shubb wrote: post #21

Can anyone recommend a particular book? So far we have: +Object-Oriented JavaScript - Second Edition +Building Machine Learning Systems with Python +Data Visualization: a successful design process +Infinispan Data Grid Platform

-Python NLTK Cookbook -jQuery Reference Guide -Practical Data Analysis

I've read all three of these and found them to be hugely informative.

When Packt get it right, they get it really right. Trouble is, they usually get it really fucking wrong, judging from this and every other thread about Packt on HN.

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#68

Post by jackgolding »

dj-wonk wrote: post #59

Any experience with their Storm, Kafka, and D3.js books? For the first two, the communities and versions move so fast that I'd be surprised if a book could be kept up to date. (Storm just hit 0.9; Kafka is now at 0.8. I wouldn't recommend that anyone use older versions at this point.) Following the mailing lists seems to be the way to go in those cases. Anyone disagree? With regards to D3, it seems like the online ex…

I haven't seen what I think is a good d3 book yet - they all are too simple (ie you don't need a chapter on how to do a simple plot)

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#69

Post by call_me_cookie »

thinkersilver wrote: post #66

I took oppurtunity of the deal and bought books on machine learning and visualization and realized that I unwittingly bought the same book twice: * Data Visualization with D3.js * Data Visualization with d3.js There's no way of reveresing this now but I do feel a bit silly.

Hey, you still only spent $10! They're DRM free to, so you could send one copy to a friend and pretend you intended to.

Re: All Packt ebooks are $5

#70

Post by alok-g »

myth_drannon wrote: post #27
shubb wrote: post #21

Can anyone recommend a particular book? So far we have: +Object-Oriented JavaScript - Second Edition +Building Machine Learning Systems with Python +Data Visualization: a successful design process +Infinispan Data Grid Platform

+Building Machine Learning Systems with Python I read "Building Machine Learning Systems with Python" and it's an interesting and good quality book. I found a small error in the code snippet and added to the book's online errata. Got a reply from Packt and they offered me a free ebook of my choice.

The book is using Python 2.7. Do you know if the examples convert and work well with Python 3+?
Post reply on HN