This is the same as an older thread, but I didn't comment in the last one, so I thought I'd comment here.
I was a technical reviewer on Node Security from Packt, and it was an interesting experience, so I thought I'd highlight a few things for those who have criticised the quality of Packt books.
- Reviewers are unpaid, I'm not sure if this is normal. I was happy to do it unpaid as experience that I could talk about with future employers. The only 'pay' is a copy of the book, and one other from the library.
- I was found and asked to be a reviewer, but I was quite surprised given my lack of experience. I was also surprised at the lack of experience of the author. I felt I was able to do my job as a reviewer, and would have declined otherwise, but I perhaps they should be finding some more experienced people.
- Node Security is one of their shorter books, most are either several hundred pages and ~$30-40, or about 100 pages and $20. During the review process I highlighted that I felt the book did not contain enough content for a $20 book, lots of it was quite practical stuff that could have been found by reading some READMEs on GitHub repos for the libraries it talked about.
- I noticed that much of the advice in the book was around deployment of Node.js applications, and I suggested an extra chapter specifically about configuring secure deployments, perhaps covering nginx reverse proxying, etc, I felt that this would really improve the overall quality of the book, the focus of each chapter, and ultimately I thought it would make the book well worth the $20. Unfortunately they declined to do this. I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure what my role as a technical reviewer was for because of this. I found some minor issues in the security theory descriptions, and a few errors in example code, as well as making a few suggestions for how bits could be worded better, but it seemed they weren't keen on any major suggestions.
I'm not sure whether I'd buy books from Packt, I'd probably have to evaluate them on an individual basis, but I felt there could have been better selection of authors and reviewers, and that they should have been more open to changes proposed by the reviewers.
Comments
This is the same as an older thread, but I didn't comment in the last one, so I thought I'd comment here.
I was a technical reviewer on Node Security from Packt, and it was an interesting experience, so I thought I'd highlight a few things for those who have criticised the quality of Packt books.
- Reviewers are unpaid, I'm not sure if this is normal. I was happy to do it unpaid as experience that I could talk about with future employers. The only 'pay' is a copy of the book, and one other from the library.
- I was found and asked to be a reviewer, but I was quite surprised given my lack of experience. I was also surprised at the lack of experience of the author. I felt I was able to do my job as a reviewer, and would have declined otherwise, but I perhaps they should be finding some more experienced people.
- Node Security is one of their shorter books, most are either several hundred pages and ~$30-40, or about 100 pages and $20. During the review process I highlighted that I felt the book did not contain enough content for a $20 book, lots of it was quite practical stuff that could have been found by reading some READMEs on GitHub repos for the libraries it talked about.
- I noticed that much of the advice in the book was around deployment of Node.js applications, and I suggested an extra chapter specifically about configuring secure deployments, perhaps covering nginx reverse proxying, etc, I felt that this would really improve the overall quality of the book, the focus of each chapter, and ultimately I thought it would make the book well worth the $20. Unfortunately they declined to do this. I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure what my role as a technical reviewer was for because of this. I found some minor issues in the security theory descriptions, and a few errors in example code, as well as making a few suggestions for how bits could be worded better, but it seemed they weren't keen on any major suggestions.
I'm not sure whether I'd buy books from Packt, I'd probably have to evaluate them on an individual basis, but I felt there could have been better selection of authors and reviewers, and that they should have been more open to changes proposed by the reviewers.