Don’t Buy My Book

technicat
technicat
Nov 3 · 4 min read

Now that I added a link to my Google Play books author page, I see it does a good job of listing all the books I’ve authored and no other

unlike Barnes and Noble, which includes books on birds and music which I definitely did not write.

Google Play Books (such an awkward name!) also conveniently provides samples,

so I can compare the two editions of my Unity book (Unity 4 and Unity 2017), at least up to the end of the first chapter.

Which brings me to my first complaint about the second edition of the book: the publisher didn’t send me a copy, as I did not sign on to author the update, and this is what I’m reduced to.

My second complaint (pointed out in Amazon reviews), is that the code is still (mostly) in Javascript/Unityscript and shortly after the book was published, Unity made C# a requirement for iOS builds. This was bad timing but also forseeable and a reason I declined to work on the update, because that was a lot of code to rewrite and reexplain. Nevertheless, I did update all the code on github.

Which brings me to my third complaint, that Apress moved all their book code to github, and I could have told them (reminded them) that updated code for my book was already on github. (My third complaint isn’t so much about code repos as the publisher tendency to ignore you after your book is published and only contact you when they want something)

My fourth complaint is that there are some errors that should have been caught, like this detail of web browser support.

That’s all wrong now (only WebGL is currently supported), but definitely at least Flash support was long gone by then.

This is something I’d expect the technical reviewer to catch. The reviewer for my book did a fine job, but I don’t see a credit for him in the second edition. Here’s part of his bio in the first edition.

And for some reason, they removed my profile photo in the second edition, replacing it with the new author but leaving it next to my bio details.

While they removed my face, they did add my address along with the new author’s, in two places.

But a) I haven’t lived there in six years, and b) why include my apartment number? I supposed I should be glad they didn’t include my phone number and email.

I attribute that all to general carelessness. I saw some of that while working on the first edition, e.g. when one editor added English punctuation to all my code listings. But one thing that seems intentional is the removal of my introduction in the first book

I suppose the nostalgic how-did-I-get-here part could be dispensed with, but there was a history of the project that is the basis of the book code

and also an explanation of how I ended each chapter.

I recommended several books in this section, and it’s too bad to see them gone, I think they’re still good reading!

But what I’m really peeved at is the removal of my acknowledgments.

I wonder if this is because I acknowledged my parents, a programming teacher, and my programmer friends (including one who passed away quite young) but not the publisher. That is rectified in the new edition.

So if you buy my Unity book, I hope you buy the first edition (Unity 4). They’re both obsolete, the first edition more so, but I get a bigger royalty percentage from that one, and it’s the original, unabridged, slightly less messy, more fully credited version with my favorite bits. Except my profile photo, I have to admit it wasn’t a good one. If I could make just one change, I’d use this.

technicat

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technicat

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