Packt Publishing

If you have visited my site for any length of time you will know that I have had quite a few dealings with Packt Publishing. I wanted to write up a quick post explaining why that is the case!

I reviewed for Packt Publishing

A very long time ago I was contacted by Packt Publishing by the always friendly Kenny Dias to write a review for Mastering Redmine. At the time I was using Redmine a lot and felt I would be in a good position to offer up my thoughts.

I was given access to the book on their site and I enjoyed the process of reading and reviewing the book. Kenny seemed to like how responsive I was and continued to offer me books. I only ever picked books that I felt I would be able to provide a fair review for. As someone who loves to read tech books it was a complete win win and I was super happy to continue with this arrangement.

If you are interested the reason I was approached it because I blogged about Redmine, not even in that much depth or frequency but clearly enough to be noticed by someone!

I wrote for Packt Publishing

Unrelated (I think) to my reviewing work that I was continuing to do for Packt Publishing I was writing about some issues I was having with Bootstrap's Typeahead functionality. Again the blog post was read by someone at Packt and I was contacted to see if I would like to write a book about Twitter's Typeahead project.

By the way, if you are seeing a theme about blogging increasing your luck surface area, you are right, I have written about how good things happen to those who blog before and stand by it.

I reviewed again for Packt Publishing!

I was actually still writing the Typeahead book when I was asked if I wanted to review some things again, and due to an administrative blip when my book was out I was asked if I wanted to review it.

If you are interested I would have given it 5/5 :-)

I didn't think they would ever want me to write again, I was honoured to be asked the first time but figured they wouldn't want to do it again. Once my book was out I started reviewing their content again.

I *almost* wrote again for Packt Publishing

Some time later I was contacted to see if I wanted to write a much bigger book for Packt Publishing, for some reason someone in there liked me and thought I did a good enough job to see if I wanted to write a 300 page book on jQuery.

Initially I jumped at the chance but had to let them down pretty early in the process. I have depression and unfortunately shortly after accepting the wonderful task of writing this book my depression took a bit of a turn for the worst and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to deliver anything even slightly good for them.

I continue to review for Packt Publishing

Amazingly Packt didn't sever all ties with me after that and to this day I still review for them, I am sure they will never ask me to write again for them but to be honest I am happy to keep on reviewing their amazing catalogue of content.

Disclaimer

I get no money for reviewing these books, and I am never coerced into writing something positive I don't believe in.