Packt was a notorious spammer of my mailing lists in the past, asking literally everyone (so it seemed) if they wanted to write a book, and then after producing one, did it again on another related topic. They didn't seem to have concerned editors and I've heard others echo these statements.
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21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
The times I've worked with them, No Starch was quite happy with LibreOffice, if that's any better. O'Reilly's insistence on making everyone use git (including non-programmers) seems a bit nuts to me.
Having worked on the editorial/production side in a couple of publishing ventures, being able to insist on a git-based workflow would have been a godsend. Given O'Reilly's reputation and prominence, they can get away with requiring more from their authors. If they have any high-profile authors that refuse to use git, I'm sure that they could assign an assistant to manually translate between git and the author's prefe…
Not just the authors. The editors, the designers, the people who do layout, and people who just never wrote a single line of code or typed a single command into a Unix shell in their life... all of them use git, and last I heard, they all have to learn how to use the CLI version of git.
It's nuts. Git is hard enough to learn for people who know the internals of how computers work. Making people who would rather be drawing artwork learn how to use git seems really crazy to me. Hearing the coping stories from non-technical people using git is very sad.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked on the editorial/production side in a couple of publishing ventures, being able to insist on a git-based workflow would have been a godsend. Given O'Reilly's reputation and prominence, they can get away with requiring more from their authors. If they have any high-profile authors that refuse to use git, I'm sure that they could assign an assistant to manually translate between git and the author's prefe…
Not just the authors. The editors, the designers, the people who do layout, and people who just never wrote a single line of code or typed a single command into a Unix shell in their life... all of them use git, and last I heard, they all have to learn how to use the CLI version of git. It's nuts. Git is hard enough to learn for people who know the internals of how computers work. Making people who would rather be dr…
I agree that git is an awfully complex tool for non-technical users to understand. However, the concept of version control is incredibly powerful—anyone who utilizes it has a huge advantage in productivity. Perhaps O'Reilly would be better off providing a more simplified system (perhaps even a simple GUI on top of git, offering a small subset of functionality), but I can see why they insist on a VCS-based workflow.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other than O'Reilly, I think most publishers still insist on MSWord for submissions.
The times I've worked with them, No Starch was quite happy with LibreOffice, if that's any better. O'Reilly's insistence on making everyone use git (including non-programmers) seems a bit nuts to me.
They have some nice tools now that work through git, although you never have to actually interact with git at any point during the writing process, unless you want to. Git just runs on the back end.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm generally unimpressed with Packt. Bill Pollock said (so consider the source) that Packt is not really a publisher, but just a printer. They don't really have any (copy)editors. They make everyone else do the work and pay them with complimentary copies of their (in my opinion) low-quality books.
I almost became an author (of a video series) for them. I signed a contract and produced a couple of chapters. I found they had pretty reasonable copy editors, at least the one I worked with was helpful and thorough. My main problem, and the reason I didn't finish the series was their advance was very low and the royalty rate was too. After looking round it seemed the rate was probably reasonable for authors in other…
I wrote a book for Packt and made less than $1000 from it, two years later. However, it is something to put on your resume (if you want to) and I managed to use it to leverage a book deal for a more reputable publisher later on. So it can be useful if you think you might want to write books in the future. However, yeah, the money isn't going to be worth your time by a long shot.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#26Packt tends to publish books of wildly different quality, some of them are good, while others are lousy written and full of mistakes (not talking about spelling errors here, but software bugs).
Also, they seem to don't know you can use colours in ebooks. I see no excuse for not having syntax highlighting in a programming ebooks. It is just lousy management from their part.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#27Pretty cool. There are some great Packt books (I liked Haviv's MEAN Web Development when trying out the stack), but am I wrong in thinking the signal-to-noise ratio is kinda bad? It reminds me a lot of Udemy (seems like anyone can publish).
The Guava book, and the High Performance Postges book was pretty good.
Additionally, something with Packt that you have to watch out for: Some of their titles conflict with each other. I.e. Along with the High Performance Postgres book, theres another book called Managing Postgresql, its not so great ircc.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#28I've published two books through them. The first book was an amazing experience. The second was a horrible experience with a high rate of turnover from my "editors" and a total lack of communication. I'm happy with the quality of my books, and I feel it was a great opportunity, but my next book I will goto a better publisher or self publish. Also, my books are about gaming on the Raspberry Pi, which I feel is a very…
My friend and I were frequently harassed over writting a book on the Raspberry pi. I'm a dev and hes an it automation person. We both have not had experience with the device.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The times I've worked with them, No Starch was quite happy with LibreOffice, if that's any better. O'Reilly's insistence on making everyone use git (including non-programmers) seems a bit nuts to me.
They have some nice tools now that work through git, although you never have to actually interact with git at any point during the writing process, unless you want to. Git just runs on the back end.
I guess things have improved. The stories I heard were about a contract-based indexer having to use CLI git.
Re: Get a Packt Pub book a day for free
#30My experience as a reviewer for a Packt book: I gave them feedback about specific technical issues, large pieces which I felt were missing and some general feedback about how the text was full of spelling mistakes and general lack of quality. I didn't hear much back from the coordinator and/or author and a few months later I received a free copy of the book. It was hardly any different from the draft I reviewed.
I also was a reviewer on a Packt book. The coordinator was sometimes a bit uncoordinated but I felt the book that came out was excellent (D Cookbook). This is probably more due to the author than anything though.
Browsing their books while choosing my free book made me realize they definitely have very open floodgates when it comes to publishing. I don't really consider flooding the market with books a problem though because I read books based on recommendation. If only a few gems come out as a result of their shotgun approach to publishing I think we are still all better off for it.