[danpalmer]

I wholeheartedly agree on the quality of BNR books, but I’ve always found Pakt to be pretty poor. I consider Pakt books to be overpriced even when 90% off in some big bundle. If you’re getting value out of them, great, I don’t want to diminish that, but for anyone considering them, there are far better options.

I say this having been a technical reviewer on a Pakt book. It was filled with errors, surface level, poorly written and edited, and my main feedback was ignored because it would have added 10 pages, even though it would also have significantly improved the learning outcomes of the book for the specific topic it was about.

[BrentOzar]

To anyone considering writing for Pakt, you owe it to yourself to read any random 5 of their books, and then consider whether you want your name to be attached to that reputation.

The books really are that bad. I think less of someone when I know they've written a book for Pakt.

[danpalmer]

I tech-reviewed "Node Security". It was something like 7 chapters, where each chapter basically took 1 popular at the time Node library related to auth and implemented in a web app.

I checked all the code samples, found a vulnerability in one, pushed for some misc changes. The quality of the English in it was atrocious (no criticism of the author, writing prose isn't everyone's strong suit) even post Pakt's editing, and I actually found 90% of my feedback was correcting grammar or improving readability, things I'd expect them to be doing.

My main contribution was recommending a chapter on deployment. Fine, the book isn't going to be a technical marvel, but a quick last chapter saying "put your server behind Nginx, here's a bit of config" would have massively improved the security posture of anything being developed from the book, and also educated readers about Node Security far more than any of the other chapters. I gave a thorough and reasoned technical rationale for the inclusion of the chapter. They said no, the book was a 7 chapter book.

I got paid with 1 physical copy of the <100 page book, and 1 free ebook voucher for any other Pakt title.