Yesterday I read Danielle’s review of GNOME 3 Application Development: Beginner’s Guide and I would like to write some comments about it because my name figures in there.
I was involved in the book as a technical reviewer and I reviewed a total of 5 chapters. This was the first time I did so for a printed book.
After reviewing those chapters, I asked my contact at the Packt Publishing to give me a final draft before publishing it and associating my name to it because I really wanted some of the issues I pointed out to be addressed.
After a while, to my surprise, I received an email from that contact announcing that the book had been published and thanking me for my contribution. Turns out they didn’t respect my request and included my name directly! After I asked that contact about our “arrangement”, he apologized for that and said it was his fault…
I am still waiting for my printed copy and I was hoping that some of the issues I had told them were corrected but after reading Danielle’s review it is pretty clear to me that they weren’t. That’s surprising to me because I made it clear that some issues were very important things and I assumed it’d be the editor/publisher’s work to take care of that.
Writing and producing a book is a difficult thing and in no way I intend to bash the author or the publisher (I haven’t even looked at the final version yet) with this post but I wanted to clarify how I my name is associated to it.
Hopefully next time Packt will take into consideration what their technical reviewers say and not just use their name for the book.
