I am such a torment. Cancelled negotiations with a publisher over disagreements on a book format? Check. Said no to taking down a free book startup and enter a publishing contract? Check. Lambasted multiple publishers for releasing PHP 6 books which do not teach anything PHP 6 specific? Check. Next month I expose which publishing companies are secretly building weapons of mass destruction in their basements. Reverse that, I can’t afford a libel suit…

In “The Art Of Deception Or Publishing PHP6 Books” I aired my unflattering opinions about publishers who have been selling “PHP 6″ books. PHP 6, last I checked, was a bit like Leprechauns (Hey, I’m Irish! The use is legal!). You love them, you have lots of ideas about what to expect from them – but has anyone every really seen one (other than my great uncle)? PHP 6 exists in CVS – it’s never had a release other than the usual CVS snapshots. It’s certainly not complete and stable, and its future feature list remains a bit flexible. You could see PHP 5.4 in 2011 before PHP 6 is finished…guessing here. As its developers would say – it’ll be ready when it’s ready. One day. Maybe.

In response to the blog post, Wrox Press picked up on the problem on Twitter via Davey Shafik (@dshafik). Everyone knows Davey. If you don’t, you must have been living under a rock, or a ruby, for a really long time. I have to say, Wrox responded in a wholly unpredicted way I have to admire. It’s not everyday you find yourself hiding in a cave in Antrim (it’s nice…a little damp though) after seeing something you wrote persuade a publisher to pull back a book destined for the printers, and work on fixing it so it deserves its title.

Here’s the full text of the comment posted to “The Art Of Deception…” earlier today by Jim Minatel (Associate Publisher – Wrox). Jim is mostly the person sitting behind @wrox over on Twitter where he’s been quite proactive in getting to the bottom of my PHP 6 Book complaints.

Pádraic:

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this with me on Twitter last night. I’m the Associate Publisher for Wrox, I’m the person usually behind @wrox on twitter.

After meeting with the editor who ran the PHP list for us, you’re right. The titles of these PHP6 books, some of the references to PHP6 in the books, what isn’t covered in the books, all prove we made a mistake, something went wrong. But how, why?

Elizabeth (and thanks for her measured response) is correct in part of her assessment that books take a long time to write and publish. I’m sure that when the editor and authors started these books in Spring 2008, they’re thinking was that 6.0 would indeed be a stable release by early 2009 (if not sooner) and they were aiming for that. But clearly along the way we dropped the ball on checking references to things like the non-existent “6.0.0 stable.”

In the Beginning PHP6, MySQL, Apache book, I can actually understand the rationale not to cover Unicode there. Given that Unicode is primarily valuable to someone internationalizing a site or localizing it for multiple languages – topics that I wouldn’t consider “Beginning” level – I can see why it wasn’t covered. (Before becoming associate publisher, I was actually our ASP.NET editor for most of the last 5 years and we don’t for example cover internationalization/localization in our Beginning ASP.NET 3.5.) So we want to have a book that Beginning level customers understand will work with PHP6 if that’s the version they’re using, but we didn’t communicate right what that meant in this context where there weren’t major new v6 features at the level we thought a beginner would need.

The professional book stumps me more. It’s hard for me to understand how that book doesn’t have a chapter on Unicode. It looks like an oversight by everyone involved in the book.

So where do we go from here and get better than this to eventually prove we’re worthy of better than when @bicatu says “That reminds me why I’ve never bought a Wrox book?”

First, I’ve asked the team involved with Beginning PHP6 scheduled to ship to the printer this week to pull that book back, to read your post and the subsequent twitter discussion and to make sure we aren’t making the same mistake a third time. I want the author and editors to provide a level of confidence that the PHP6 features that should be covered are, that the discussion of the current state of PHP6 is accurate, and the that the title, subtitle, and marketing copy on the book and online accurately reflects what is and isn’t covered.

Second, publishing the right books depends on having the right team, including a large number of well placed community experts on the topics who serve as authors, freelance/contract technical editors. There’s always room for a team to improve, through learning and through recruiting. I hope this discussion helps our current team in PHP (and MySQL and LAMP in general) and I hope it helps us attract people like you who have ideas on what we can do better. I’d like to invite you and everyone who’s commented on this post so far (and I’ll post the invite on twitter too) to get involved. We’ve got a PHP Design Patterns book scheduled to publish in August (not specific to any version) I’d like to start by offering you all a preview of that. If you see any red flags, tell us. If you like it, if you see issues and help us make it better, at a minimum we’ll send you a free copy. If you get involved more extensively, you can discuss with the editor contract work. DM me in twitter with your email addresses if you want to get involved. Or email me at the address below.

Thanks for caring enough to get our attention. I promise, we’re listening.

Jim Minatel
Associate Publisher – Wrox
jminatel at w I l e y d o t c o m

On a side note, Jim spelled my name correctly. Class. I called Jim, “John”, on Twitter. Fail.

Rather impressed with Wrox right now.

If I have a remaining concern it would be that with PHP 6 unreleased and in flux, it still seems dangerous to title books using that version number. The most current updated PHP version from next Tuesday will be PHP 5.3 which is itself a pretty giant leap over PHP 5.2. PHP 6 is conceivably years away – its release date isn’t set in stone (I don’t know if anyone has even estimated it recently).

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