In February this year I was contacted by the team at PACKT Publishing about being a technical reviewer for a book which was underway, in exchange I would get a free copy of the book and be listed in the book as one of the reviewers. I have toyed with the idea of writing a book for ages so this felt like a good idea to see what happens behind the scenes without committing to actually writing a book. I said yup to them, and today that book got published! You can get it at: http://bit.ly/json_cookbook (I am really excited about this)
The book* itself is a very interesting mix of content, from the very basics of JSON to introduction to MongoDB and storing data in it. It very much hits the nail on the head with the description “Quick answers to common problems”. What I think is really awesome about it, is that it really tries to cover a lot of languages & tools. So there is .NET, Java, Node.js, Android, ObjectiveC and more. The examples are really great as all work on a variety of OS’s too, so you can quickly try stuff out. I don’t think it is a book you It isn’t a book you would read end to end but rather give you guidance on where to start with problems related to JSON.
The experience itself of reviewing was interesting, each chapter took a few hours of reading and trying out the code and responding with details of issues found. The people I worked with at PACKT made it really pleasant. I never heard from the author or other reviewers, which in hindsight is odd but I think that maybe helped keep my responses focused and not have a bias in them.
If you do pick it up, let me know what you thought of it!
*Note: I’ve only see the content I reviewed, I haven’t seen the final book which maybe different.