[jalino23]

I have this terrible bias about pack-pub publishing that I associate with low quality books because of the unity books I bought 4-5 years ago. Which is unfair cause I’m sure I’m missing high quality books.

I have the opposite bias towards orielly and nostarch books. which I regard as high quality. And I’m sure theres also terrible books there.

[WoodenChair]

Unfortunately it's true. They mass-recruit authors who want to be "published" via solicitation emails and then provide them limited support (as well as a limited or non-existent advance).

That doesn't mean there are no good Packt books. There are. It just means the average of quality will be lower than some other more picky publishers.

I feel bad for the good authors who get lumped together with the bad authors by virtue of their publisher. And I feel bad for the potentially good authors who just didn't get enough support in the writing process.

Don't judge a book by its cover or its publisher, but you may want to be a little more skeptical when Packt is the publisher on average.

[diegoveralli]

The saddest part is how a lot of technical work goes to waste, because Packt won't give authors even the bare minimum technical review and copy-editing support.

I started reading "Mastering Linux Device Driver Development" a while ago but I found it to be almost unreadable, and I gave up after a couple of chapters. On top of the at times incomprehensible grammar, I found a few too many errata in the form of "can" vs "cannot", "only by" instead of "by only", etc... that change the meaning of the text significantly. It was too much work to pause every time I found the text confusing, to figure out what the author really meant.

[jdkoeck]

I don’t think your bias is unfair, I once bought a Packt-published book and it was _bad_ (to put it nicely).

[moi2388]

I have the same bias. It’s a bias based on all packt pub books I’ve read so far.

Reading this blog, it’s another author who isn’t a native English speaker; and it shows. I’m betting there will be plenty of bugs and typos in this book as well unfortunately.

[HexDecOctBin]

Native English speakers write less buggy code? That's a pretty good competitive advantage.

[pdpi]

Technical books aren't just about the code itself. Programmers don't necessarily make for good technical writers, and non-native speakers of any language are worse writers on average in that language. Put those two things together, and a non-native programmer writing their first book needs all the help they can get with editing and reviewing the text.

[arp242]

Even a native author will need all the help they can get with editing and reviewing the text. But yes, even more so for non-native speakers.

[moi2388]

Oh no, I did not mean to imply that. Just that quality control at packt doesn’t seem to great, so the books contain bugs and typos. The latter probably more if the author is not a native speaker.

[mydogcanpurr]

There's literally nothing unfair about this. Publishers have reputations, and they matter.

[blue1]

These are heuristics. They work most times (so I don’t buy Packt anymore).

[pjmlp]

I buy mostly ebooks for technical stuff, no need to kill trees in fashion driven industry, so I take advantage of Pack deals when they come around.

Yes there are plenty of books that aren't that good, but there are also quite nice gems there.

Oreilley was good in the golden days of UNIX, nowadays it is just like any editor.

The few NoStarch books that I have, with exception of the Rust book, all seem quite superficial to me, more towards begginers.