--- title: "Book Gripes, Safari Bookshelf, And a .Net Desktops Prize" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/19/book-gripes-safari-bookshelf-and-a-net-desktops-prize.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/19/book-gripes-safari-bookshelf-and-a-net-desktops-prize.html" published: "2003-06-19T20:43:00" updated: "2003-06-19T20:43:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "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…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Book Gripes, Safari Bookshelf, And a .Net Desktops Prize By Roy Osherove June 19, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published June 19, 2003; technical details may be outdated. - **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](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201616416/qid=1056065321/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/iserializable-20) 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](http://www.safaribooksonline.com/) 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](http://scoble.weblogs.com/) 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](http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/story/8523.aspx) yet? ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Jun 24, 2003 ### [.Net Rocks Rocks, INETA, and Starting A User Group](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/24/net-rocks-rocks-ineta-and-starting-a-user-group.html) - Jun 23, 2003 ### [Stop The Silliness](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/23/stop-the-silliness.html) - Jun 18, 2003 ### [SQL Server is Missing NextVal Functionality](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/18/sql-server-is-missing-nextval-functionality.html) - Jun 18, 2003 ### [About Interfaces](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/18/about-interfaces.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/