My experience as a reviewer for a Packt book: I gave them feedback about specific technical issues, large pieces which I felt were missing and some general feedback about how the text was full of spelling mistakes and general lack of quality.<p>I didn't hear much back from the coordinator and/or author and a few months later I received a free copy of the book. It was hardly any different from the draft I reviewed.
Packt once approached me to write a book about LaTeX. They would only accept the manuscript in MS Word.<p>Needless to say negotiations didn't get very far.<p>To be honest that wasn't necessarily a red-line, but it was clear that their typesetting was fairly basic (their books at the time did look like Word docs - I've not looked at one in print for a while so I can't comment on current standards) and their ability to provide information about royalties was opaque to say the least. So my confidence wasn't with them.<p>But fair play to Packt, in a short space of time they've created a large collection of titles, particularly in niche areas which O'Reilly wouldn't touch. It's great that there is a publisher willing to invest in the IT textbook sector. I'm just hoping that things have improved as they've grown.
Pretty cool. There are some great Packt books (I liked Haviv's MEAN Web Development when trying out the stack), but am I wrong in thinking the signal-to-noise ratio is kinda bad? It reminds me a lot of Udemy (seems like anyone can publish).
I've just published with Packt and the experience was better than the previous times I've worked with them. The reviewers they had on board spotted lots of issues - both with wording and the technical aspects - and the project coordinator was quick to respond.<p>My biggest issue with them is that their tooling is poor, from using MS Word templates to having no version control process for documents and code.<p>I agree with other posters that the quality of the book will strongly depend on the writer.
I've published two books through them. The first book was an amazing experience. The second was a horrible experience with a high rate of turnover from my "editors" and a total lack of communication.<p>I'm happy with the quality of my books, and I feel it was a great opportunity, but my next book I will goto a better publisher or self publish.<p>Also, my books are about gaming on the Raspberry Pi, which I feel is a very niche topic.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1784399337" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/1784399337</a>
Packt was a notorious spammer of my mailing lists in the past, asking literally everyone (so it seemed) if they wanted to write a book, and then after producing one, did it again on another related topic. They didn't seem to have concerned editors and I've heard others echo these statements.
Most of these have been starters or quick intros and over a couple years old, although potentially useful. I have downloaded a few and read through the entire postrgres one in under an hour.<p>I am reading AngularJS Web App Dev Cookbook from packt and it's a pretty good read.
This is pretty neat, but I wonder why not download an epub or pdf version of the book right away as well:<p><pre><code> var downloadurl = 'https://www.packtpub.com/ebook_download/'+getBookUrl.split('/')[2]+'/epub';
request(downloadurl)
.pipe(require('fs')
.createWriteStream('./books/book_'+getBookUrl.split('/')[2]+'.epub'));
</code></pre>
Oh and btw, for those not aware of this yet, if you use gmail, you can use example+spam@gmail.com and it will arrive in your inbox, but more easy to label as spam and auto-delete if they start spamming.
Packt tends to publish books of wildly different quality, some of them are good, while others are lousy written and full of mistakes (not talking about spelling errors here, but software bugs).<p>Also, they seem to don't know you can use colours in ebooks. I see no excuse for not having syntax highlighting in a programming ebooks. It is just lousy management from their part.