> Does anyone know/recommend the author?

Haven't heard of him before, but did get a little giggle from the website's almost 'bizspeak' description of a tool they have. It's so vague I have to give it credit.

https://ledin.com/real-time-simulation-protocol/

It's a broken link so can't even see what it does.

Same here. Packt's business model is quantity over quality. Some of the books are a copy paste of the official documentation with minimal changes. And there is no depth at all. I stay away from Packt books, but if there is a recommendation, can read this one.

I think so too. But I have also read good Packt books, it depends on the author.

+1 for staying away from Packt. I was once part of the review process for a draft. It was poorly written by someone who clearly wasn’t a domain expert. The published version was just as bad as the draft, irrespective of the feedback given by all the reviewers.

My experience with them was less than favorable. We started our book journey with them but had to abandon them because their editorial team & processes were so bad. Their insistence on artificially inflating the book's thickness with larger fonts was just the final straw.

We were fortunate to work with Manning & O’Reilly to complete our book. The quality, professionalism, and integrity we saw with them and the contrast with Packt was night and day.

Did you have to pay a fee to get out of the contract with Packt?

No, we tried escalating the issues on those practices to the exec team, explicitly requesting a change in policies to enhance the quality of our book. The middle managers we were dealing with simply threw in the towel after that.

PS: This was several years ago, and the policies may have degraded even further since then.

+1 on the questionable quality of content by Packt. It's generally not the highest quality content from whatever little experience I have. Most of the books that I read had outright wrong examples, that did not even compile. Content always seemed rushed and superfluous with no real thought given to coherency.

I downloaded a few books ~5 years ago and the quality wasn't that great, it was like reading a reworded tutorial in a random website.

Checking the author is a good call

I was an (unpaid) technical reviewer for a Packt book on Arduino back in 2012. After a couple of chapters I realized that the book made little sense and was mostly plagiarized. It took more effort and conflict than I liked to convince Packt that this was a problem and couldn't merely be fixed by editing. I definitely would not be a Packt reviewer again.

What's the incentive for donating your time in such a role? Name on the cover?

Helping the community...

> What's the incentive for donating your time in such a role? Name on the cover?

Name in the book as the technical reviewer, and a copy of the physical book if it goes to print.

from what I gathered, pakt tends to be a free for all. manning offers a similar subscription service and I've found that while the selection is smaller, the quality is much better.

IME Packt is very poor. I had one excellent book, one okay one and a whole lot of trash. The entire brand is on my Do Not Buy list.

> Sometimes I feel Packt books are not the highest quality.

Well, I have observed sometimes they are not the lowest quality. So on any subscription service I try to filter out Packt books if possible.

Packt is hit & miss but some have decent authors and good reviews.

"Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn" by Sebastian Raschka et al.

"In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow" by Matthew Topol.

I got asked to write a book by Packt as a lead author with two years experience in a junior position. This was a (badly) paid role of like 800 GBP or something. Take from that what you will...

Yeah, I was similarly approached (on LinkedIn) to write a book on a topic I'm nowhere near an expert nor vocal about it in social media, etc.

I'm not really in social media at all, so I take the approach as a cold-call for writing a book, which seems like a red flag to me.