Wrox Press: The Insider

Read what one of the contributing authors of Wrox Press (former) has to say:

http://www.extremephp.org

fwiw, i posted another article to /. re; this (looks like the guy @ extremephp already tried this & they didn't post it, but what the hell). who knows, tho... i've yet to date to get an article posted on /. ... maybe taco just doesn't like me, or somethin'.

well, as astounding as this news is, my submission to /. was rejected. figures.

Um - it's wrox. No surprise to what has happened as that corp in whole was a poorly ran company that had not a sense in marketing anyways. So, no shocker there...

hiya jpenn,

my view on wrox was that they had the marketing thing nailed - online support via forums, downloadable code examples, books written by 'peers' with bios and photos in the books & online ... plus, making sure you knew about all of this stuff - but their implementation sucked eggs.

I've always found wrox books to be loaded with marketing, but terrible on information, poorly written/edited, and especially difficult to learn from (eg, i've always hated the way they break their sample code into different sections, w/ little blurbs in between... it breaks the continuity of the example, and makes typing the thing in that much slower. put the example together first, and explain the damn thing either before, or afterwards).

Anyhow.

I'm not surprised by their demise at all, either... frankly, OReilly does a much better job of providing value-added after sale features, such as online support, downloadable code, books written by peers, etc... tho, perhaps where OReilly doesn't scream their marketing from the mountaintop, their implementation has always been 100% better than wrox's.

Ya - OReilly is IMHO the best publisher of the crop. Sams is another good publisher (there Unleashed series is great).

As for the marketing aspect I was talking about - I am a frequent at the bookstore (Borders to be exact) and a wrox book never stood (or stands) out from the crowd. You can always tell the books that are marketed heavily (and the books of good quality) as they tend to stand out within the book store in one way or another; the good sellers also stand out as they get special displays in the store - and a wrox book has never been one of them...

What about Que, any opinions on them????

Gotcha.

I agree w/ you 100%... OReilly & Sams are the shiznit. Actually, the 2 books currently on my desk are Sams' PHP and MySQL Web Development (Welling & Thomson) and OReilly's Javascript book ...

Personally, I don't like Sams (in general) especially, the complete idiot's guide series. They make you read hella pages for so little knowledge. They baby the reader too much.

WOW, No wonder I'm having such a hard time getting all of this. I've been using WROX for a while now and can't seem to get everything done that I want to. I seem to get more information from you guys than I do from my book.