What is the best (computer book) publisher to write for and why?

Question

I have written a book for Packt publishing because they asked me too. Having gone through a year long experience with them I found that there were many pros and cons to having written for them - a fairly new publisher (upstart built from the staff that fell out of the Wrox buy out).

Question: Having enjoyed the writing process quite a bit, I find myself itching to write my next book. I was wondering if people would mind sharing their opinions and experiences that they had with the various other publishers (O'Reilly, Manning, Sams, etc.) which they wrote for or considered writing for (but didn't)?

Responses:

@Akway - I am not sure what to think about your statement? "Software engineers shouldn't write books on programming, programmers should". Is that some metaphysical statement that I am not getting? Once you get to a certain point in your career you will no longer be just a programmer or just a developer (perhaps a script kiddie applies here as well?) but you will eventually become a software engineer. Someone who NOT ONLY knows how to code but is also aware of concepts such as design patterns, which language might fit a certain project better, etc. There is more to engineering than just programming...where as the other way doesn't apply equally as well.

Answer 1

Well, if you listen to Jeff Atwood, you'll just blog instead of bothering with books.

Answer 2

I haven't actually written books for any of these companies, but I believe you can gain some insight by reading the preface of some of these books, and see what the authors say about their corporate partners.

In particular, Manning, O'Reilly, and APress all have authors who say that their publishing partners work diligently for them, and care about the quality of the books they publish.

Jon Skeet wrote his C# in Depth book with Manning, and has many positive things to say about his partners at Manning. In addition, the books that Manning publishes are friendly-looking, and a joy to read, IMO.

Maybe some of these authors can chime in on this thread and give their opinion. Or, you could just ask them.

Answer 3

Two publishers that have some reputation at least in my eyes are pragmatic bookshelf and the Head First series from o'reilly

Answer 4

Mostly, I've really liked my experiences writing for O'Reilly (two books, two editions of each), with one exception (Python Cookbook 2nd ed) where my co-author (my wife Anna) and I had to spend two sleepless days in a row fixing some disasters in copyediting in the nick of time.

O'Reilly Tools dept had a couple of glitches in their rendering of Docbook at that time, and the proofs they sent to the outsourced copyeditor (and not to us at the same time...) made it impossible to visually tell whether some text was plain, a quote, or code -- the copyeditor understandably was misled by this (it was kind of fun seeing her copyedit famous Knuth quotes, actually;-), and added her own quirks, which basically can be summarized (from what I can judge) as working from a (mostly good) checklist without deep understanding of the subject matter.

For example, a sentence starting "There are faster algorithms, but [&c]" was copyedited to start "Algorithms are faster, but [&c]"...;-). We got profuse apologies for the mixup (you can well believe we complained, loudly;-) and safeguards were put in place that should prevent any repetition of such glitches in the future.