Tell it, brother!

I just requested two review copies of this, not bothering to have read any reviews first. I guess I didn’t want to be biased, but the friend who I requested another copy for sent me here. Now I know why APress didn’t respond. (I requested some books from ORA at the same time and got an immediate reply, though the receptionstic person took seriously my mini-proposal for Perl Flowchating and couldn’t remember if _Learning Haskell_ was a O’Reilly title or not. Usually ORA’s entire staff is sharp as a tack. Didn’t mean to screw with the innocets. Not all of us have had apple pie made from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Anywho.

Just wanted to empahtise. I did technical review for _Perl: How to Program_. The author-bots cut and paste their VB book and then edited it and rewrote the examples. Perl is written in a radically different style — when it’s written worth a damn — so the coverage was abysmal. The code was littered with style problems, security problems, and downright ignorance, none of which would be corrected before it went to print. And in 800 pages of rubbish, they didn’t scratch the surface of programming or Perl. Worst of all, the goons who wrote this apparently were calculated about doing little work, churning out books, and making money. They have the market virtually corned on massive introduction volumes.

Sad to hear about APress. I’ll be interested to know who the editor was that signed this deal. I wrote for them. They had to pry the content out of my hands. Some chapters got rewritten ten times. I’m still not happy with it. Copy edit butchered it a bit. Microsoft Word was a pain (though wine ran it admirably). I wrote the thing in POD and wrote some code to compile the POD into RTF — and not just plain RTF, RTF that passed for the output of Microsoft Word’s RTF, which was littered wih bizarre style crap. Microsoft is not the tool for that. O’Reilly is doing DocBook, and their authors use a mix of technical tools. I originally pushed ORA to take TeX, figuring they’d be unable to refuse and I could generate it easy, or learn LaTeX, or the whole experience would be a net positive. But aside from dealing with Microsoft Word, the experience was positive. They were supportive of my repeated schedule slips , I expect because they saw work in (though they took inventory of what I had more and more frequently). My editor had good feedback, and I was involved (to various degrees) in various parts of the process. At one point, I was arguing cover price with higher-ups, and even though the copy text went back and forth several times, I was still allowed togive final approval on what was actually used. It was a good experience. I guess I hate to see them for want of a dedicated author, and some dedication on the author’s part (especially when it comes to technical review’s input) would have made it at least an average book. I’m convinced that Perl owes its success largely to the quality of certain books written for it, including the original Programming Perl you mentioned. Larry’s carefree style puts readers at ease while he delves into things that would otherwise be fussy sounding details or stress-inducing advanced topics. The flip side of the coin is that a language without good reading material is at a serious disadvantage. I *want* to learn OCaml. My friend wants me to. I guess Mozilla needs to do a lot better job keeping place in electronic documents.

-scott

I like the public discussion model, and maybe that would have helped, but many times, the publishers are trying to hit specific dates and the public discussion model is too slow. Computer book publishing is pretty kooky – the publishers are often trying to please large-scale book-buyers (bookstores) and not necessarily individuals. In theory, the book-buyers should be paying attention to what people want.

Maybe someone could start a public-discussion Ocaml book and then just make it available through a print-on-demand publisher like lulu.com. I wonder how well that would do. Does anyone know if a model like that has worked well before?
Mark

Howerver if they do pay in advance why don’t the insist on getting well written stuff delivered? And why won’t the let do proof-readings and “hear” on them. I remember that I just had comment on another book I find very valuable ‘Programming Ruby’ and I pointed out some “trouble-spots” in the Ruby-C-edge (wel it was a comment about C and the author has changed that immediatly). What do you loose if you act like that?

The longer I think about it the more strange this becomes.

Howerver maybe Peter Seibel’s way of doin such book was “wise”. AFAIKT he asked Question ins comp.lang.lisp over and over again, he put the draft out on the net and has invited all to comment on it. Common Lisp is a quite complex language and Ocaml has his share of complexity also. Maybe it would have been a good idea to put that stuff out for “public discussion also”?

It’s sad I’m looking into a good book for Ocaml since ages, the best I found was supposed to get published but it never was. I think this would have been a good thing for Ocaml. This language is really underestimated….

Have a nice day
Friedrich

I am disappointed that Practical Ocaml wasn’t better. I’d love to see an Erlang book done well, too. It sounds like Rich did what he was supposed to, it is unfortunate the the publisher didn’t listen.

It seems some of these books are just “up for grabs” for someone who is interested in the subject, and making a name as an expert – even though they do not have any practical experience.

Many bad books out there :)

Well they told me that they are not interested. Now that I read this I’m quite happy that there were not. Imagine that book would be “bad” written and just to deliver something it would have been published.

But there’s one thing which really disturbs me. The publishers usually do not pay someone for the work involved while writing, but some percentage of the sellings.

So why were they forced to “publish”? And what happens now to someone with a good idea? Will they publish another “Practical” book in that series?

Will they find a better writer next time? Or don’t they care at all?

Regards
Friedrich

The others were all by the same author (a native English speaker) who literally could not write a sentence. I don’t mean the style was a little awkward, or not to my personal liking; it was not at a 5th grade level. I had to be told repeatedly to ignore the grammatical problems, but it was irritating that this person was going to have their name on the cover of a book when the writing was at the level of an incoherent blog post. Subsequent drafts I received had been completely re-written, and yet this author continues to be published. I don’t understand it, as the technical competence was also rather poor.

I agree that the per-hour cost is totally not worth it, but I actually enjoy the rigor of being forced to learn the subject in depth enough to fact-check. I content myself with treating tech reviews as less a part-time job than an educational subsidy.