One of my first reviews for Making Embedded System came on the O’Reilly site and it was a not a good review. I mean, it was a bad review (and it wasn’t particularly well written).<\/p>\n
It was somewhat heartbreaking to have put all that work into a book and then have someone bash it. And he hadn’t really read it (one of the things he said was terrible was, funny enough, something I was saying was terrible if only he’d done more than flip through it).<\/p>\n
Ouch. But I try (try really, really hard sometimes) to learn from mistakes and to be as mature as possible about such things. I totally agree with this author’s posting<\/a>: “The biggest enemy of our careers is not bad reviews, but obscurity.” As with my view on ebook pirating, I may not like bad reviews but I do want my book to make ripples. I am not yet to Scalzi’s delighting in one star reviews<\/a> but I’d almost (almost, maybe) have bad reviews than nothing. Of course, Scalzi’s examples are much funnier than mine. And he’s got a thicker skin from years of doing this.<\/p>\n But as we were gone on our cross country trip<\/a>, two more reviews were added to my book on Amazon<\/a>, heaping my collection of 5-star reviews there to a lucky 7.\u00a0 (Which isn’t to say that 8 or 9 or 53 would be unlucky, feel free to add more, I won’t mind.)<\/p>\n Now, I will admit that I know Ken Brown, one of the Amazon reviewers. And when he said, “Well, is there anything else I could do?” after tech reviewing it (and doing an awesome job with the review), I immediately asked if he could pretty please write a review.<\/p>\n Still, seven people like my book enough to take the time to write a review in Amazon. I’m sometimes surprised by what they liked most about it. I mean, check this<\/a>\u00a0out from James Langbridge, a guy I’ve never met (though we exchanged emails after he entered some errata):<\/p>\n This book is full of technical detail, but more importantly, it is full of wisdom. I had fun reading this, and to the question would I recommend this book to a friend? I already have, to junior members of my team.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I like “I had fun reading this”… such a wonderful thing to say about a technical book. And this:<\/p>\n I would say that the most valuable contribution this book makes is in explaining the design integration of hardware components and basic EE-technologies to a software developer who has not yet experienced the design of a sophisticated embedded system. – Ira Laefsky<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n