Comment by woleium
3 years ago
are Manning books any better these days? They always used to rush the most awful poorly edited and planned content to market to be the first ones with a book on $NewTechnology
3 years ago
are Manning books any better these days? They always used to rush the most awful poorly edited and planned content to market to be the first ones with a book on $NewTechnology
I read the first few pages. It was riddled with problems.
1. Section 1.1 shows an APL program "1 2 2 2 2 2 ⊤ n" and says, "The confusion here lies in the fact that you might not know what ⊤ means.". Nope. The confusion is that I don't know what any of the symbols do or how an APL program is structured. I expect this is the case for most readers.
2. There are 3 examples here. The discussions of the examples are not next to the examples. It is all jumbled up and hard to read.
3. The Java example spells main as mian.
4. Section 2 says, "programmers write a lot more code than they read". That is incorrect. For example, normally I read several of the solutions on Stackoverflow before I decide which one to copy and paste :-)
The "mian" thing is not an error. It's there to make a point about how the brain interprets code, depending on your familiarity with the language and problem. She explains it not much later on.
I’ve always liked Manning…the one I can’t stand is Packt…
I have purchased exactly two Packt books.
One was actually fantastic quality -- one of the best ML/Python programming books I've come across.
The other was for some specialty GIS work, and it was tremendously terrible quality but the only source available.
I used to check on the Packt page where they gave a book away for free daily a few years ago.
Out of all of the books most of them were trash. There was a couple of really good ones in there. But all-over my clear impression from the books was that Packt has basically no lower bar whatsoever on quality.
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Please feel free to share the title of the good book!
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Look at the table of contents for this book and make your judgement. I say no.
Yeah, Manning books have generally been in the "better than nothing" category for me. Don't know about this book though, it might be an exception.
That hasn't been my experience and I own quite a few of their books.
I was to comment the same the other day , but the post was about some book the author was promoting so I didnt want to be a party popper but the book was totally mediocre.
It seems to me the inevitable destiny of all "tech" press, start with strong titles and devolve into crap, or to be fairer a crap-shoot.
So now you have:
ALWAYS HAVE BEEN "CRAP" = Packt and Apress
STARTED OK,GOOD NOW MOSTLY CRAP = Pragmatic, Manning, No Starch
STILL OK,GOOD = O'Reilly, CUP
Where's the No Starch judgment coming from? While they seem to have started veering into more mainstream/maker-y type stuff over the years, I've never had a single bad book off of them, and in terms of actual physical quality I'm not sure there's any publisher that's better.
Check out the last titles, I am barely exaggerating with these fictitious ones to not crap on actual ones:
- How to make palindromes with python
- A CSS lexicon,900 terms defined (120 pages)
- The buttons of a PS5 controller
I've had mixed results with Packt and Apress (quite a few typos in Packt). Pragmatic, Manning, and No Starch have all been pretty good, as has O'Reilly.