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 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.
I picked up all the Rust books when I decided to learn Rust a few months back. Fortunately, two were from the library (the Rust book and the Apress one), while the other I already had thanks to a Humble Bundle deal (the O'Reilly one). The Rust Programming Book is excellent (and also available freely online/via rustup docs --book, but I like to read on paper when I can). The O'Reilly one is a little out of date, but unsurprisingly comprehensive and answers some questions that were of interest to me (like that a match expression turns into a jump table automatically if the data an be appropriately indexed, e.g., if you're matching on a u8) and covers macros which the book does not. The Apress book, on the other hand, is a hot mess and often actively wrong (and important things like the distinction between String, str, OsString and OsStr are simply ignored). If I wasn't just blindly requesting stuff via my library's online catalog, I would have skipped it because I've never seen a good Apress book.
(edited to say Apress and not Packt. I'd forgotten which crappy publisher I was dealing with.)
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
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.
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.
