WROX Press

Word on the streets is that Wrox is closing their doors.  Wrox has had some good authors and good books, but unfortunately they are few and far between.  I got to the point where I wouldn't even glipse at a Wrox press book unless someone specificaly pointed me to it, or I knew THE author.  Great books from Wrox: Beginning Visual Basic 6 and Professional SQL Server 2000 (and the 7.0 book btw). 

I've had a couple of "indexers" from the book industry, and they told me that with the vast majority of the multi-author books that the first person to actually read the book cover to cover is the first person to buy it.  Maybe I expect more from a book, but if one third of the book are grids full of function listings, another third of a book are crappy case studies, then I just bought a $60 dollar book for about 60 pgs of info that I could probably gleem off the internet.  I hope MS Press keeps hiring good authors and putting out quality books, and I'm sure we can continue the excellence from DevelopMentor of course.  APress for a while was pushing out some quality stuff too, but many of their .NET books that I sat down with during the beta are still unfortunately written against the beta 2 version (with even a big "updated for Beta 2 sign on the cover."  I know that Brian's excellent Crystal Report book never got published due to APress's dim outlook of the .NET book industry.

It's a shame really, this leaves on Sams publishing out there as a publisher that would ever be silly enough to publish my "Visual Basic .NET For Non-Weinnies" book.  Although Wrox would insist on on calling it "Professional Visual Basic .NET for Non-Weinnies" and put my ugly mug on the cover