Jem Matzan has a damning article entitled Subject to shill: tech books as corporate marketing in which O’Reilly and Adaptive Path are panned for producing.. well, crap:
The book’s primary content reads like a marketing pitch for Adaptive Path services. It’s packed with enthusiasm but entirely devoid of substance. There are whole paragraphs that meander around non-specific subjects, one leading into another until you’re pretty sure you’ve got the gist of what the authors are trying to say, but you have no idea how to apply it to your business.
It’s too bad that the book comes out as a fairly transparent marketing ploy. Several of my friends and colleagues agree with me in the opinion that the quality of O’Reilly titles has gone down over the past few years. The last book from O’Reilly that I have bought was the Information Architecture book, but that was fairly recent.
I am also reminded of the Adaptive Crap image from 2001.
