It amazes me that authors of books on coding languages (PHP, JavaScript, etc) let their books come out with so many errors.To be a successful coder one must be obsessive-compulsive about avoiding typos and other syntax errors. Yet in their published books, these supposedly successful coders seem to forget all about that–which, of course, makes life miserable for people using their books.
The latest example is Visual Quickstart Guide: jQuery by Steven Holzner (“an award-winning author who … has written more than 100 books”). I’m only up to page 56 and have found many errors. Now I’m up against a script that simply doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. I downloaded the author’s version of the script from the Peachpit site and that doesn’t do any better. Maybe Steven Holzner should be more concerned with quality rather than quantity. Also it would be nice if there were some way to contact the author. (Of course if you know you’re publishing crappy books, you probably don’t want to be contacted.) I’ve received good answers to my questions about their books from some authors I have been able to contact.
The Peachpit site has about 4-5 “corrections”–most of the one’s I’ve encountered in the first few pages are not there. A look at the Amazon page for this book reveals several reviews all noting the same high level of errors.
Come one Steven Holzner! Come on Peachpit Press. You owe your readers better than this!