Book Reviews – Again

drsql — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:53:00 GMT

I have gotten a few more reviews in, and interestingly I appreciate the negative ones almost as much as the positive ones. I prefer the negative ones that have decent star ratings better… but what are you going to do.

The most recent review was critical of the book for not having mentioned testing. I actually think that this was really good criticism and have already started my planning for how to rectify this. The only thing I wish this reviewer had done was mention the rest of the book. This person has three reviews on Amazon and some cool stuff on his wish list (if we ever meet, I will be happy to buy you an expresso/cup of coffee and discuss the rest of the book, which pretty much goes for anyone, if you want. I will also buy you lunch at my favorite restaurant: Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. Only rule is that we have to talk about the book at least a little).

Please, if you have read the book, oh please (am I begging), I beg you (yes, I am begging) to please email me your feelings on the book or post reviews. I would love to know what you thought of it. I just want to make the book better and who knows, I usually give out a few copies of the next book (no guarantees) if the advice is really constructive.

The real problem here is that writing is a VERY slow process. If my book was electronic, I could start writing and shoehorn in the new material and be done with it. But a book is not like a website. I wrote the book as a cohesive 650+ pages that are supposed to work together as a unit. Unlike a set of web pages, my hope is that you will skim 1/2 of the book and read at least half (which half depends on you, but I like both halves.) And in each edition, I try to give more and more information as I find it, learn it, and on a few shining occasions, make something up.

In the first edition, the process was simply that I wrote what I thought I wanted to say, and editor(s) hacked that to bits. So about 10 people were involved in the creation. Now, working on the fifth edition I have had hundreds of people give me feedback, and a fairly small percentage tell me stuff that was missing that ruined the experience for them. I take these comments VERY seriously, especially if I agree with them. If you compared version one to the fourth version, a lot of the stuff I was really enthused about didn’t make too many people all that excited, so I cut it. In this last version, I have more examples, more code, and more technique, because it was asked for.

Now if I just knew if this reviewer liked anything else about, or if there was more that was disliked I could possibly make the next book even better. So if you have any ideas/feelings/criticism/etc email them to louis@drsql.org. Thanks!

Book Reviews…

drsql — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:59:03 GMT

When I wrote the 2005 book, I promised that I would take the time to respond to reviews as much as possible. From the good ones if I didn’t really believe that the person read the book (there were a few I have seen, but not too many people tend to write good reviews that clearly haven’t read the book unless they are paid to.) In fact, I am constantly surprised with good reviews, mostly because it is so difficult to write a book. I just spent an hour yesterday tracking down 20+ typos that the Chinese translator found.

I will also comment on the less good ones that are posted by people who clearly don’t like the material. You aren’t required to like the book, and when I am writing it I purposefully will ruffle the feathers of certain groups of people (particularly the ones who don’t believe normalization matters!) In fact, I think that the 2005 book was significantly better than the first primarily because of a few reviews that smacked me around and made me realize some of the errors in judgment that I made. My favorite review of the 2005 book was a private review that was scathing in a few important points that I applied to the 2008 book.

What burns my feathers is bad reviews that have no information whatsoever. I mean, take this review of the book on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/review/R29BAGXMZMIC7Y/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm):

Waste time to reading this book.,
“Since nobody publish a review for this book, I would like to say something. I have to say: Don't read it. It just waste your time.”

Now, I won’t make any kind of fun of the reviewers grammar, as it is very likely that he is not a native English speaker. But if I were to review a remake of Bio-Dome where Pauly Shore spoke with an English accent in Shakespearean-style rhyme and stopped watching the film 5 minutes inI could say more than this about than “it will waste your time.” I will also admit that there are probably a million people that would plunk down a tenner and happily watch this movie (and not just because movie theater popcorn is so much better than you can make at home.) Part of a good book review is to identify the type of reader. If this person is a DBA, this might be that he read the first chapter and said “bleh,” then fair enough. If he read the words “database” and thought that there would be dating tips, well, yeah, it would be a waste of time.

I might not be able to speak for every author out there, but I am sure that almost any author loves to get honest feedback on their work, particularly us who write trade literature. I want to target what people want to read, and with new editions likely for new versions of SQL Server, it is important to provide new/fresh/useful upgrades to the material. The best place to determine what to add are reviews: public, private , whatever, as long as they are from people who have read the material and know what they were reading.

As always, if you want to contact me, go to the contact form on my website: http://drsql.org/contactus.aspx (you can contact me anoymously there too) or email me at louis@drsql.org. Just please give honest feedback about what you have seen, not just post a review because no one has published a review yet.

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Book Reviews – Again

Book Reviews…