- One of the biggest(and most common) mistakes a tech book publisher can make is not knowing to quit while your ahead. Much like bad movie sequels, You'll often see a good book followed by a bunch of totally redundant books that try to sqeeze a little more money out of the customer by luring them with a name that sounds a lot like the first one, but usually holds nothing more than a faded out copy of the messages from it...
Example: A very good book called Extreme Programming Explained was published in 1999. It was a pretty big succes, as the topic was pretty new and provocative(I bought it and learned a lot).
So, in the years following that book, the following books came out as well:
- Planning Extreme Programming
- Extreme Programming Perspectives
- Extreme Programming Installed
- Questioning Extreme Programming
- Extreme Programming for Web Projects
- Testing Extreme Programming
Insane. Totally insane. The first one was really great. All the rest are mostly a rehash of the first one, with a slightly different context. Cognitive dissonance for the impulse buyer, giving us peanuts on every book instead of stuffing it all into a nice good book without chewing 75% of the first book over and over.
- On a different note:
I registered for the Safari Online Bookshelf 30 day trial through our company MSDN subscruption, and it seems really cool. Lots of cool books there, though I really don't like the fact that they pre-stuffed my bookshelf with 7(!) books I didn't ask for and cannot get rid of until the trial period ends, leaving me room for only 13 books which I pick. Hey, If you're gonna give something away, just give it, no smarty-pants games please.
- Yet another note: .Net Desktops Prize
Scoble promised to try and find some cool prize for the .Net Desktops contest. Yey! Thanks scoble! Now it's gonna get interesting :) Have you signed up yet?