I have a lot of respect for the ladies and gents over at Magenic. There are some big names working there, not least of which are Rocky Lhotka and Jason Bock. Both Jason and Rocky are great people that I've met or spoken with and put forward a seriously accomplished and professional image for Magenic. Lots of the Magenic people also write books; a raft of books came out from the late Wrox Press with the word Magenic somewhere on the cover, and by and large they were good books. I even spent some time at Magenic's website today trying to download some sample code for a book (of which more in a minute) and actually found myself looking into the company's culture, where it's offices were and almost wishing I was moving somewhere near them so I could sign up when we move back to the States soon.
The reason for this sudden interest in all things Magenic is that I have a client engagement tomorrow that looks to be quite SQL Server DTS heavy. It's not a big job, and on the surface doesn't seem overly complex, but I've not really spent any time with DTS in the past so I'm spending today researching, studying and trying things out to get my head around everything DTS has to offer. I'm an O'Reilly Safari subscriber so that was the first place I headed out to. A quick scan of the books available revealed a couple that would suit my needs including the marvellously named SQL Server DTS! How perfect a fit is that! Also, it's a Magenic book, written by a bunch of Magenic people and so I instantly thought it would be a book I could trust.
In the true spirit of the FBI's global Top Ten Most Wanted (i.e Avoid these faces like the plague) list, here's a mugshot
 I hate this book. This is probably the worse technical book I have ever come across. It's awful. I'm sure the guys that wrote it know their stuff ( they have to, after all they work at Magenic), so I think this book is made absolutely dire by an almost complete lack of technical editing, proof reading and reviewing. I've had a lot of very intense technical review processes over the years on my own books, and I hated every one of them. But the end of that endless nitpicking, hair splitting and general annoying "oh I think you mean X, instead of x" type comments always, ALWAYS, resulted in a fantastic book. This book does not appear to have been reviewed, or in any way updated since it's release. Chapter 2 walks you through building a fairly complex and lengthy example to show how to develop a DTS package. It seemed like just the thing I needed ; a nice thorough immersion in the DTS package building environment. But, the walkthrough is fundamentally wrong. It references buttons that don't exist, tabs on dialogs that are nowhere in site. It talks about relationship mappings between fields while you are looking at a screen for writing VB Script, and then starts telling you to select this field and that field to remove mappings, BUT I'M LOOKING AT A F*CKING VBSCRIPT EDITOR!
The book tells you to go to www.magenic.com/publications to download the sample code, but that's a link that doesn't actually exist ( you need to go to Magenic.com and then click on Thought Leadership, then books, then find the book in the list, and THEN download the source code you are after). It offers the suggestion that if that doesn't work, go to www.newriders.com, which is a site for a whole bunch of publishers now all owned by the Infomit Network, with not a single link in sight to download sample code for a book, and in fact I couldn't even find the book on that site.
The language in the book is stilted, and in places rambling - it sounds like someone explaining something then losing their train of thought after going down a completely strange tangent. It just doesn't sit well together at all, and after wasting 3 hours of my life trying to get the bloody example in chapter 2 to work I have zero confidence that the rest of the book will teach me what I need to know.
As I said earlier though, I'm not sure this is the fault of the authors. Magenic only hire class people. I think the blame most probably lies firmly with New Riders, and their absolutely piss poor editing, reviewing and production process. That's the last New Rider's book I'm going to waste a Safari Bookshelf slot on .
I'd love to hear some feedback from the authors themselves though - I know some of the Magenic guys read this blog - so let us know guys - what went wrong here?
1:14:03 PM 
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