[Discuss] Have you done a technical book review?

[Derek Martin]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 11:36:34AM -0500, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
> I was asked by Packt publishing to do a technical book review (Apache SOLR
> for Beginners)
> 
> I'm wondering if anyone else on the list has been a technical reviewer
> before and would share your experience.

I've reviewed several of the editions in the series Unix and/or Linux
Systems Administrator's Guide by Nemeth, Snyder, et al., at first
unpaid, and then finally for pay.  The folks at Prentice Hall were a
delight to work with and they actually ended up paying me double what
they originally offered... though that turned out to be a mixed
blessing of sorts.

> I was initially excited about the opportunity but it's become apparent, at
> least in this case, that the quality is not all there.  The author is
> Italian, and I'm re-writing the book in proper English rather than making
> quality/style assessments.  

I agree with Drew... this isn't your job, but letting the editor know
if/that the material is incomprehensible is worthwhile.

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 05:20:35PM +0000, Englander, Irvin wrote:
> Copy editing is somebody else's job. Unless the overall writing is
> so bad that the whole topic is unclear and the book should be
> scrapped, the English is outside the scope of the review.

Despite what I just wrote about this not being the reviewer's job, I
don't entirely agree.  Even exceptionally literate people have bad
days.  If a particular passage is poorly constructed such that the
effort to make sense of it detracts from the message (or distracts
from receiving it), I think generally that's worth a brief comment.

I think technical reviewers are generally chosen because they already
have some sort of expertise in the field (or at least that's the
hope)...  If they can't understand what the author is saying, chances
are no one else may be able to either.  Given the nature of the
material, A copy editor might not have the technical expertise to
recognize that the passage in question isn't clear enough.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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