I agree with Trey. My experience with Wrox books has also been mixed. The ASP series of books were very good. But, the first edition Beginning series of .NET titles, like Beginning C#, were a mess, the lack of editing was very apparent. That's the biggest problem I have with these books, the subject matter is good, the concepts are good. But, the mispellings, omissions, misinformation and poor code samples(oh lord, the code samples, are almost always buggy) are a disservice to every reader who spent their hard earned money. If readers can find these errors so easily, why in heavan's name can't book editors find them first??? Answer: because they don't bother trying, last minute changes are made by authors and no one checks them and books get rushed out the door. Like Trey said, a big part of that has to do with multiple authors submitting and changing the material at different and last minute times before printing.

I also agree that being the very first publisher to rush a poor quality book out the door on a new technology is a mistake and hurts a publishers reputation. A higher quality book that ships later will pay off in the end. The assumption by publishers that they can just post errata and release second editions to fix all the errors is just plain negligence. It's akin to buggy software that gets sold with the assumption that patches will just get installed and new versions will get sold. Again, negligence.

I hope Wiley is just what the doctor ordered. To assist in this effort, why not beta test the books, just like you would software? Give out pre-release versions to a bunch of readers, give them x amount of time and let them find as many errors as possible. Perhaps let the volunteer readers choose which chapters to review from a sign-up web page, and when those chapters fill up, they have to pick from other chapters. This way the books get full coverage. In exchange, reviewers should get a free copy of the final release and their name added to the book under a reviewers section. A nice gesture that could possibly help a reviewers career. Would also look good for Wiley to show their quality control effort in each book. Sounds fair to me. A win/win for Wiley and reviewers. I'm sure many of the subscribers on this forum would be interested. I sure would! Heck, I'll even sign an NDA if need be.

Dan Maltes