[danpalmer]

Great post, lots of detail. After reading this I would be more likely to want to publish with and buy from Manning. I’ve been a technical reviewer for Packt, and since doing so would avoid buying any of their books. As a customer of Mannings’, they seem better, and seeing the inside of the process and the amount of review that happens, I think they sound great all things considered.

[GrinningFool]

I dropped out of being a technical reviewer for Packt after they declined my suggestions about things that were factually wrong, because that's not what they wanted me to review.

They never fixed the many factual inaccuracies before it went to print.

[jwr]

I found Packt books to often be of rather poor quality, and I'm now avoiding things published by them. Manning is slightly better, but not that much. I'd consider both brands to be rather poor at reviewing and editing.

[danpalmer]

This does not surprise me. In the book I reviewed there were a lot of simplistic explanations that lacked nuance. Even if that's the right level for their target market, I think it could have been done in a better way, giving the reader the push to go and research in more depth if they so wish, but to be honest I'm not sure the author was at that level.

[4thaccount]

I have lots of programming books (30-40) from half a dozen publishers and Manning is one of my favorite along with NoStarch Press. O'Reilly is probably third, but they don't make books anymore. Packt is alright, but you often don't get the same thing as a Manning book. They're more like a way for someone to quickly get something out that works, but there are definitely misspellings and grammatical errors, but nothing that would prevent you from learning.

[stephenbez]

What do you mean O'Reilly doesn't make books anymore? I've read books from them recently.

[detaro]

They don't sell their books themselves anymore, only a digital subscription (so you need to buy from bookstores etc), parent might have been thinking of that.

[4thaccount]

This. They still make content, but I believe it's all digital.

I don't think they create paper books anymore. Is that incorrect?

[detaro]

From what I understand they still make books, they just don't sell them directly anymore. Amazon has them. (Unless they abandoned that in the meantime too and I missed it happening)

[newscracker]

No, it's not "just digital". It's subscription-only through Safari Online! You can "stream" books and learning videos from there, but you'd never own one. You cannot buy a DRM free O'Reilly eBook anymore, unless it's from one of those Humble Bundle sales (where the selection may or may not suit your needs). I just stopped supporting O'Reilly when it went subscription only, and I'm guessing there are lots of people and companies with Safari subscriptions that don't really use it as much (compared to the percentage that uses it).

[detaro]

You can buy them from all kinds of book sellers: https://www.ebooks.com/en-de/searchapp/searchresults.net?drm... (random example that allowed filtering by DRM-free)

Just not from them directly.

[spectramax]

I’ve had bad experience from both Packt and Manning, it’s simply not trustworthy. I’m sure there are a good mix of bad and good books, but I’ve bought books that simply rephrased API docs of insert-popular-open-source-language.

I support independent publishing and small publishers, but as a consumer, you need to build trust in the quality of the content across the board, not just a handful. If I see a book from Springer or O’Reilly, I know I can at least trust some baseline expectations from a book - true there are some bad apples as well, but they are at least edible unlike Manning/Packt where I got a load of shit instead of an Apple for $29.

[garren]

I agree with you regarding Packt - books I've purchased from them tend to be more miss than hit. I haven't had the same experience with Manning though. In fact, Manning has been my go to rather than O'Reilly, the former king of technical books, for a few years now.

I used to be a big O'Reilly fan, but the quality of their content seemed to go down 5 or so years ago. It seemed like they were at the peak of churning out books on every topic imaginable - I think they stretched themselves too thin. They seemed to go from great to mediocre overnight. When they closed their online shop a year or so back, and really started pushing Safari hard I stopped getting anything from them.

[StavrosK]

Why would you avoid Packt?

[slezyr]

Read few Packt books written by authors that know nothing about the topic of the book.

For example their blender book is absolute trash and waste of time.

https://www.packtpub.com/hardware-and-creative/blender-3d-ba...

Their model in the middle of the book could be made in 5mins. And most of the book author writes about history of animation and other offtopics.

https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/hardware_and_creative...

[StavrosK]

Oh wow, that's egregious, thanks.

[0xADEADBEE]

Not the OP but have avoided Packt books for years: I find them to typically exhibit quite low quality of writing and I assert without proof that they lack the rigor in the editing process that more 'serious' publishers have. Also I think it's pretty easy to become a Packt author; some people I've worked with and a friend have been approached by them. Typically I only buy Manning or O'Reilly but I've read a few garbage titles from the latter of late so I suspect that might not hold for much longer. It'll be interesting to see if perceived quality becomes a market differentiator or if tech books at some point become unprofitable.

[ocdtrekkie]

My impression from everyone I talked to is that Packt does not care about quality or accuracy, but aims to print a book as fast as possible. I also spoke to an author of a Packt book who said they'd never work with them again.

I'd also note that I often find Packt books which don't even spell the name of the topic they're covering correctly, right on the cover.

[StavrosK]

I see, thank you, that's good to know.

[Kihashi]

I avoid them after they asked me to write about a topic that I didn't even have on my resume. I also found the quality of the books that I had purchased to not be very high.

> Packt is planning to publish a book titled as 'SQLAlchemy cookbook' which would be a 300 page book and in the process of seeking potential authors to work on this book I also read through your resume [Link]. It is evident that you have an expertise in this area and as such seems to be an ideal candidate to author this book for us.

They linked to my actual resume that had 0 mention of SQLAlchemy. At the time, I had also graduated less than a year before, which was clearly mentioned on my resume as well.

[danpalmer]

OP here, lots of reasons. I reviewed a book called "Node Security".

- The level of technical quality of the book was not what I would expect for ~$40.

- I was arguably naive and under qualified (although probably qualified enough for the level the book ended up being), having some Node and some security experience.

- The author was probably more naive and no more qualified, having no security experience.

- The book ended up becoming a list of tutorials about how to use certain libraries for authentication/etc in Node apps.

- My main feedback was that I felt an additional last chapter should be added, that showed how to deploy a node app behind Nginx with a basic security setup in production. I felt this was in-line with the very (in my opinion overly) practical nature of the book, I also felt that "deploy behind Nginx" or something along those lines was one of the most obvious things to do in terms of security, and a real quick win. They made it clear that adding a chapter, however short, was out of the question.

- Really the only thing I was encouraged to do was to test the code examples to make sure they worked. I did find a security vulnerability in one of them, and that was fixed, but that was probably the most meaningful change I had an impact on.

[fuzzythinker]

There is a reason why they are the only publisher that discount their books in such a dramatic ways:

- 80% off a topic everyday

- $5 selected ebooks every other week or so

- $5 all ebooks few times a year

Why would they offer such steep discounts if the books are of high quality?

For me, I never even bother to waste time looking even at $5 (or even if free) since 99.9% of them are really just crap.

[barnson]

A few years ago, they asked me to be a tech reviewer and the compensation was a credit/bio, a copy of the book, and an ebook of any other of their books. No money. I took that as a sign they weren't serious about getting a good review.

[nickpeterson]

Yeah, I'll add that I've bought quite a few packt books (mostly because I like cryptic things and they have crazy sales). Avoid them, Manning and Apress tend to be much better. Honestly I tend towards textbooks anymore...

[mapmeld]

I've been invited to write a Packt book on a topic that I knew very little about; I might have had one repo related to it.

[StavrosK]

Come to think of it, they invited me out of the blue to write a book on some random topic as well, I had forgotten about that.