Thank you for supplying the links to my 26 page review. I am hopeful that more than a handful of people find value in my extended book reviews, at least more so than those reviews that simply summarize a book’s table of contents.

Yes, you are probably right regarding the reason why I did not receive the spam email… if so, you might have found the solution to the spamming problem.

I have also had problems submitting errata to Apress – I just assumed that the authors had indicated that the errata items were not errors. In light of your comment, the errata items might have been lost in a misrouted XML data package, sent to the recycler/shredder for pre-processing.

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For those interested in a little light reading, I have a 10 page review of “Oracle Core” on my blog, along with a 35.5 page review of an Apress book, a 24 page review of a red covered book, and roughly 15 other extended length Oracle Database book reviews.

I think you probably disqualified yourself from the spam list by doing the wrong type of review.

You didn’t supply links to the review you mention (which wasn’t for the same book that Alex reviewed), but I think it’s worth pointing people to the type of review that can be a real help in assessing both the book and the review:

Part 1: http://hoopercharles.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/book-review-oracle-database-11gr2-performance-tuning-cookbook-part-1/
Part 2: http://hoopercharles.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/book-review-oracle-database-11gr2-performance-tuning-cookbook-part-2/

Publishers generally don’t seem to be very good at publishing errata – I’ve sent several corrections for Oracle Core in to Apress, using the official errata page, but only a couple of them have appeared so far. That’s why I have my own errata and addenda pages on the blog.

Regarding “Validity none?” – “depends on implementation” is not consistent with “all”.

What was the last errata item that I submitted? Pages 84-88 of the book describe the virtues of implementing multiple block sizes in a single database, without mentioning a single potential issue associated with implementing such a configuration. Page 88 contains rampant plagiarism, copying word for word, the bullet points from this web page:
dba-oracle.com/s_oracle_block_size.htm

One would think that plagiarizing anything from that site would be immediate grounds for pulling the book off the market. This is the second of two books published by Packt Publishing that I looked at, and the second of two that contained plagiarized content (the other book was pulled from the market). I am sure that this statistic is not consistent across all of their books, but it is an odd statistic. What guidance is Packt Publishing providing to their selected book authors, or for that matter their technical reviewers?

As I mentioned, I feel insulted. I paid the full cover price.

1. Validity none? Wouldn’t that depend on implementation. Point applies to both indexes and bad publicity. Yes, we all know how indexes are implemented in Oracle, certainly no need to rebuild. But publicity – so much room for improvisation.

2. The review. I so wanted the two (the original comment and the review) to be isolation level serializable. Awkward timing. Thanks for the link though. So to repay the favour: anyone reading this comment before midnight 30th August New York time, Jonathan’s book “Oracle Core” is on special at apress.com ($10 daily deal plus 50% off ebooks in August, so comes to $5). Five dollars, cheaper than a pint of decent beer, but infinitely more wisdom.

PS When I was typing the original comment, I was going to make a different joke. That you and Richard had orchestrated the publicity for Packt on purpose. Then I thought that’d be too much so I reverted to the “bad publicity still publicity” joke. But now that I posted a link to your book, the readers may suspect an even deeper conspiracy.

It looks like you believe the old saying: “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. Unfortunately that claim carries the same validity as the claim that: “all b-tree indexes need to be rebuilt regularly”, i.e. none.

I noticed that your backlink leads to a reasonably favourable review you did of a book published by Packt; this adds some backing to my comment that the behaviour of the publisher isn’t necessarily a reflection of the ability of the author. I’m even happy to give you a little publicity by supplying a link to the review so that others can see it for themselves.

Unfortunately, I seem to get the same spam from Packt, including the one you highlighted above. I now simply ignore them and hit the delete button but this all does much harm in the end as I recently refused to review a book from someone who I did actually know in large part because they chose to get it published with the “Packt spammers”. One of the disadvantages I guess of having a popular blog such as this.