Mike C.

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since January 25, 2002

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January 25, 2002, on The book behind the book behind the book...:
Bravo! I co-authored a book a couple of years ago about Oracle running on NT, and ran into the same clueless incompetence on the part of the publisher. People seemed to like the book (or at least they said they did), but everything you said was true (e.g., the desire to fill up pages with screenshots, the carping about deadlines, the revisions that made no sense, Word templates that felt more like a straitjacket, the wasteful CDROM, etc.). One of the first things they said prior to me signing the contract was that the book needed to be at least a couple of inches thick, so it'd look good on the bookshelf next to all the other books for sale. Sheesh. They used really big type, lots o' screenshots (against my better judgment), and even the paper the pages were printed on was extra-thick! Now the book's out of print, which is probably for the better. I'm happy to have helped some people, but the finished product was far inferior to what it could have been. That was the firs...