I'm not as enthusiastic about Amazon user reviews. There are several big problems:
There is a tendancy for books to be reviewed by the people who like them. The gushing enthusiasm syndrome is at its worst in the Big Fat Airport Book genre of science fiction. Disregarding reviews with substantial spelling or grammatical defects ameliorates this problem.
Reviews by shills are depressingly common. These are the worst sort, because they're often quite literate and to the point. They're hard to spot, too, mostly showing up if you've noticed the name of the reviewer in some other context in close association with the book's author's name.
(Begin main rant)
Finally there's the "Top NNN reviewer" syndrome. Some of these are authentic, but a lot seem to be by idiots who scan the provided publisher review for basic details and paraphrase them. They always award 5 stars (to get a "this review was useful for me" click from the author?) and they sometimes are laughably off base.
For example, from the 5 star review for a book of mine:
"This should not be your first book on computers..."
Well no. That's because it's called "Building Portals with the Java Portlet API" and someone completely ignorant of computers wouldn't choose that in preference to an obvious beginners book on computing unless they were doing a LOT of drugs.
The guy who wrote that review is a "top ten" reviewer. His recent reviews covered such subjects as ASP.NET, Reproductive Biology, Architecture, the Confederate Horse Artillery, Corporate Finance, and Cultural anthropology.
None of these reviews contain any facts from outside the editorial reviews. Every one of his last 50 reviews was a five star reviews. Either he's REALLY enthusiastic about a LOT of subjects, or he's some complete tosser who's writing reviews of books he's not read in order to get whatever benefits acrue from being a Top 10 Reviewer.
And if he's honest, then I'm a leopard.
Amazon, of course, don't care because it helps to sell books when naiive users see a five star review from an apparently disinterested third party for a book they were considering buying.
Personally, however, I'm happier with the readers who disliked my book, awarded it the minimum one star rating (how come you can't give zero?) but were writing an honest review. Even if they are eejots:-)
I wish Amazon would consider the longer term effect on their reputation and kick out any top reviewer who's taking this approach. But I won't hold my breath.
Agreed, and perhaps it should be taught, though I suspect it's something that has to have an element of experience.
But you can get a taste for this; I've done some work as a "support" developer, figuring out arcane bugs in other peoples' code. I find it immensely enjoyable, and it's delightful when you finally figure out the cause-of-problem in some convoluted interaction of multiple bugs.
The only problems with it are the bureaucracy of getting fixes into production systems, and the poor pay. I do development work mostly, because despite the fact that bugfixing is ten times harder than creating code from scratch, the pay is lousy in support!
The same Spirit that was in Jesus of Nazareth inspired the writers of the Bible. As all Scripture is inspired in this manner, Jesus (the man in which God lived) did not have to say those things himself.
You know that the Bible is divinely inspired, because it says so in the Bible, which is divinely inspired? Hmmm.
That you don't approve of it doesn't make it untrue.
If you want to get something you usually have to compromise. If you can't stomach the compromise, then you have little choice but to accept that you might not get what you want.
Having read the damned article, I'd like to point out something that a lot of posters seem to be missing.
Nowhere that I've seen in that article does he say that ponytails and sandals signify anything about the skills, attitude, or professionalism of the people in question.
He is talking about peoples' perceptions, and the need to be politically savvy when selling OSS to those same people.
One of the things that he stressed is that there is no money in writing books - you do it essentially for the love
I sort of agree. Tech writing takes a phenomenal amount of time, and the pay is absolutely miniscule. I never expect to make money out of writing compared to my normal contract work.
But - I don't write purely for the "love" (though it is a massive hit when you first hold a bound copy of a real honest-to-god book that you wrote yourself), but rather for the benefits of being a published author.
It's great for your CV, it gives you something easy to talk about in interviews, it is surprisingly respected by co-workers, and if you've done a half-decent job of it, you will be contacted by people seeking an expert in the field.
Your friend may well write for the love of it, but I suspect most tech authors, while not mercenaries by any means, are writing for some of the intangible benefits. Which is all to the good - if you're putting your reputation AND your opportunities on the line, you try damn hard to make a good job of it.
When you buy a technical book, you're paying for quite a lot:
Proof reading Technical review Project management Artists and graphic design Layout for printing Printing Shipping Returns (books are generally sold on a "sale or return" basis) Authors Unsuccessful publications
Without all of that you might get a good quality product, in the rare cases where an author has all the necessary skills, but mostly you won't.
Technical books are a niche product. ANY technical book is a financial gamble, because the target audience is (usually) so small. You might sell 10,000 copies if you're lucky, but you might sell none. Poor processes at any stage will guarantee that you'll sell NONE to any given reader again.
From my perspective as an author: all the parties concerned spend a huge amount of time putting a book together - each chapter passes in sequence through a couple of dozen stages, each one of which requires hours of one person's time. Specifically, I earn about 10% for an hour spent working on writing of the money I would earn from my clients doing development.
See Apress.com for their standard contract terms if you want to decide if the fabulous riches of authorship have swayed my opinions. Ho ho.
The IBM compatible PC was already pretty obviously the future of the market place in 1995. By 2000 you'd have to be working in a different industry and be struck deaf and blind not to know this. Your other dates seem pretty specious too.
While you're employees who do a job you don't do (and hence don't understand), perhaps you'd like to consider that sales people are the reason you get paid.
Do Slashdot reviews ever disparage the books under scrutiny? I've never seen one that did. I'd be curious to know if that's a matter of editorial policy from the/. team, or if it's actually just that they don't get many negative reviews...?
If it's the latter, I have a few books on the shelf of shame that deserve a basting.
"Sending someone to coventry" means pretending they're not there as a punishment, in the UK at least. I have no idea why. And the "Tachy" bit I couldn't begin to guess at.
Google's motto is "Do no evil". I would interpret this much as promising that they will do no harm, not that they will right all wrongs. Much as a medical doctor under the Hippocratic Oath promises not to harm patients, rather than promising to cure all their ills.
Given a choice between a (legally constrained) presence in China and no presence whatsoever, it is less than clear to me that they are "doing evil" by remaining. Perhaps you think that they are doing harm by doing business under a repressive regime, but I would have to respectfully disagree there.
Since they are acting only to censor themselves (a distinction beyond the wit of one BBC Radio 4 listener who called an afternoon news programme to ask why they couldn't censor sexually oriented websites while they're at it) I fail to see the hypocrisy in their actions.
Actually this is the one and only thing that bugs me. Everything else comes under the "your site, your rules" heading.
But to change an attributed quote (as in "MythMoth says: blah blah blah") is wrong to the point of being actionable. There's an accepted way of making such changes, which is why in the normal press you'll often see "Johannes Smythe says: blah blah [blah] blah" The square brackets are there so we all know who said what - that third blah was added by the editor for clarity.
Slashdot is no longer Commander Taco's private blog. It sells advertising, and is associated with OSDN which is (AFAIK) a commercial group. It therefore has that much in common with the normal commercial press and should take on some of the virtues while it's aping their faults.
"The world is obviously flat! Clearly people in the southern hemisphere would fall off otherwise. The round-earth thing is only a theory, after all."
Not a surprising victory. The prosecution took the smart approach of inviting testimony against ID from established scientists with strong religious backgrounds. But a pleasing victory.
I have not RTFA and I didn't need to. I knew it would be Andrew Orlowski. He's El Reg's chief troll. While he may sincerely believe the views he espouses, it's quite unnecessary. His purpose is to drive hits to the Reg, which I'm sure he achieves effortlessly with his polemics against popular organisations.
Who'd bother to read Yet Another Article dissing Microsoft? But a man who hates Google? Or Wikipedia? Freak! Show him to me!
The Register is tabloid journalism. It's amusing. But don't take it seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not as enthusiastic about Amazon user reviews. There are several big problems:
:-)
There is a tendancy for books to be reviewed by the people who like them. The gushing enthusiasm syndrome is at its worst in the Big Fat Airport Book genre of science fiction. Disregarding reviews with substantial spelling or grammatical defects ameliorates this problem.
Reviews by shills are depressingly common. These are the worst sort, because they're often quite literate and to the point. They're hard to spot, too, mostly showing up if you've noticed the name of the reviewer in some other context in close association with the book's author's name.
(Begin main rant)
Finally there's the "Top NNN reviewer" syndrome. Some of these are authentic, but a lot seem to be by idiots who scan the provided publisher review for basic details and paraphrase them. They always award 5 stars (to get a "this review was useful for me" click from the author?) and they sometimes are laughably off base.
For example, from the 5 star review for a book of mine:
"This should not be your first book on computers..."
Well no. That's because it's called "Building Portals with the Java Portlet API" and someone completely ignorant of computers wouldn't choose that in preference to an obvious beginners book on computing unless they were doing a LOT of drugs.
The guy who wrote that review is a "top ten" reviewer. His recent reviews covered such subjects as ASP.NET, Reproductive Biology, Architecture, the Confederate Horse Artillery, Corporate Finance, and Cultural anthropology.
None of these reviews contain any facts from outside the editorial reviews. Every one of his last 50 reviews was a five star reviews. Either he's REALLY enthusiastic about a LOT of subjects, or he's some complete tosser who's writing reviews of books he's not read in order to get whatever benefits acrue from being a Top 10 Reviewer.
And if he's honest, then I'm a leopard.
Amazon, of course, don't care because it helps to sell books when naiive users see a five star review from an apparently disinterested third party for a book they were considering buying.
Personally, however, I'm happier with the readers who disliked my book, awarded it the minimum one star rating (how come you can't give zero?) but were writing an honest review. Even if they are eejots
I wish Amazon would consider the longer term effect on their reputation and kick out any top reviewer who's taking this approach. But I won't hold my breath.
(End rant)
Agreed, and perhaps it should be taught, though I suspect it's something that has to have an element of experience.
But you can get a taste for this; I've done some work as a "support" developer, figuring out arcane bugs in other peoples' code. I find it immensely enjoyable, and it's delightful when you finally figure out the cause-of-problem in some convoluted interaction of multiple bugs.
The only problems with it are the bureaucracy of getting fixes into production systems, and the poor pay. I do development work mostly, because despite the fact that bugfixing is ten times harder than creating code from scratch, the pay is lousy in support!
The same Spirit that was in Jesus of Nazareth inspired the writers of the Bible. As all Scripture is inspired in this manner, Jesus (the man in which God lived) did not have to say those things himself.
You know that the Bible is divinely inspired, because it says so in the Bible, which is divinely inspired? Hmmm.
Sure, if they want it badly. So far they don't seem to. So if you're selling OSS it's time to lose the sandals.
Catch-alls are how a lot of people who own their own domains provide unique email addresses to every site they visit
Yep. Right up to the point that I started to get > 3000 spam an hour from arsehole spammers running dictionary attacks on domains.
That you don't approve of it doesn't make it untrue.
If you want to get something you usually have to compromise. If you can't stomach the compromise, then you have little choice but to accept that you might not get what you want.
Sure, and the correct bugfix for war is for people to start being nice to each instead. But here in the real world we need diplomacy.
Having read the damned article, I'd like to point out something that a lot of posters seem to be missing.
Nowhere that I've seen in that article does he say that ponytails and sandals signify anything about the skills, attitude, or professionalism of the people in question.
He is talking about peoples' perceptions, and the need to be politically savvy when selling OSS to those same people.
One of the things that he stressed is that there is no money in writing books - you do it essentially for the love
I sort of agree. Tech writing takes a phenomenal amount of time, and the pay is absolutely miniscule. I never expect to make money out of writing compared to my normal contract work.
But - I don't write purely for the "love" (though it is a massive hit when you first hold a bound copy of a real honest-to-god book that you wrote yourself), but rather for the benefits of being a published author.
It's great for your CV, it gives you something easy to talk about in interviews, it is surprisingly respected by co-workers, and if you've done a half-decent job of it, you will be contacted by people seeking an expert in the field.
Your friend may well write for the love of it, but I suspect most tech authors, while not mercenaries by any means, are writing for some of the intangible benefits. Which is all to the good - if you're putting your reputation AND your opportunities on the line, you try damn hard to make a good job of it.
When you buy a technical book, you're paying for quite a lot:
Proof reading
Technical review
Project management
Artists and graphic design
Layout for printing
Printing
Shipping
Returns (books are generally sold on a "sale or return" basis)
Authors
Unsuccessful publications
Without all of that you might get a good quality product, in the rare cases where an author has all the necessary skills, but mostly you won't.
Technical books are a niche product. ANY technical book is a financial gamble, because the target audience is (usually) so small. You might sell 10,000 copies if you're lucky, but you might sell none. Poor processes at any stage will guarantee that you'll sell NONE to any given reader again.
From my perspective as an author: all the parties concerned spend a huge amount of time putting a book together - each chapter passes in sequence through a couple of dozen stages, each one of which requires hours of one person's time. Specifically, I earn about 10% for an hour spent working on writing of the money I would earn from my clients doing development.
See Apress.com for their standard contract terms if you want to decide if the fabulous riches of authorship have swayed my opinions. Ho ho.
The IBM compatible PC was already pretty obviously the future of the market place in 1995. By 2000 you'd have to be working in a different industry and be struck deaf and blind not to know this. Your other dates seem pretty specious too.
Just Add War.
While you're employees who do a job you don't do (and hence don't understand), perhaps you'd like to consider that sales people are the reason you get paid.
Do Slashdot reviews ever disparage the books under scrutiny? I've never seen one that did. I'd be curious to know if that's a matter of editorial policy from the /. team, or if it's actually just that they don't get many negative reviews...?
If it's the latter, I have a few books on the shelf of shame that deserve a basting.
"Sending someone to coventry" means pretending they're not there as a punishment, in the UK at least. I have no idea why. And the "Tachy" bit I couldn't begin to guess at.
Not exactly clarifying the situation I admit.
Google's motto is "Do no evil". I would interpret this much as promising that they will do no harm, not that they will right all wrongs. Much as a medical doctor under the Hippocratic Oath promises not to harm patients, rather than promising to cure all their ills.
Given a choice between a (legally constrained) presence in China and no presence whatsoever, it is less than clear to me that they are "doing evil" by remaining. Perhaps you think that they are doing harm by doing business under a repressive regime, but I would have to respectfully disagree there.
Since they are acting only to censor themselves (a distinction beyond the wit of one BBC Radio 4 listener who called an afternoon news programme to ask why they couldn't censor sexually oriented websites while they're at it) I fail to see the hypocrisy in their actions.
Oh, right, because the slashdot trolls aren't ingenious enough to come up with a way to abuse that system, nor are they juvenile enough. Ho, ho, ho...
Actually this is the one and only thing that bugs me. Everything else comes under the "your site, your rules" heading.
But to change an attributed quote (as in "MythMoth says: blah blah blah") is wrong to the point of being actionable. There's an accepted way of making such changes, which is why in the normal press you'll often see "Johannes Smythe says: blah blah [blah] blah" The square brackets are there so we all know who said what - that third blah was added by the editor for clarity.
Slashdot is no longer Commander Taco's private blog. It sells advertising, and is associated with OSDN which is (AFAIK) a commercial group. It therefore has that much in common with the normal commercial press and should take on some of the virtues while it's aping their faults.
Perhaps because he's always insightful and perspicacious. As such what he has to say is interesting.
1 8&mode=flat
Moreover, he has already addressed your "point" in this very forum, something he certainly didn't have to do: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/15/01552
substitute college for company...
:-)
I thought you were being sardonic actually. You should have left it unamended
"The world is obviously flat! Clearly people in the southern hemisphere would fall off otherwise. The round-earth thing is only a theory, after all."
Not a surprising victory. The prosecution took the smart approach of inviting testimony against ID from established scientists with strong religious backgrounds. But a pleasing victory.
I have not RTFA and I didn't need to. I knew it would be Andrew Orlowski. He's El Reg's chief troll. While he may sincerely believe the views he espouses, it's quite unnecessary. His purpose is to drive hits to the Reg, which I'm sure he achieves effortlessly with his polemics against popular organisations.
Who'd bother to read Yet Another Article dissing Microsoft? But a man who hates Google? Or Wikipedia? Freak! Show him to me!
The Register is tabloid journalism. It's amusing. But don't take it seriously.
Aside from the well known tomes that have already been praised here, I'm a big fan of this: (1-55860-576-2) Joe Celko's "SQL for Smarties".
Duff on Duff's Device:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html
Ironically I've found Make Magazine, published by O'Reilly, to be the very thing that I originally hoped Wired would be.
I read a few issues of Wired and then stopped bothering. I read the first issue of Make and subscribed. Eagerly awaiting issue 4.