Because of my background in pfSense, about 6 months ago I was approached by Packt Publishing, asking if I would be willing to be a technical reviewer for an upcoming book they were publishing on pfSense 2. No pay, just a couple of free books from their library, and a bio in the front of the pfSense book. Why not, right?
Being the first time I have done something like this, I thought it was pretty good opportunity to get a feel for what it was like to review a pre-published technical book like this. I was a little surprised at how much input I had, as I felt like my comments were well-received, and that I actually did have a hand in shaping parts of the book,
Well, the long and short of it, is that I enjoyed the experience, and I would recommend the pfSense 2 Cookbook to anyone looking for a practical guide to configuring pfSense 2.
-Josh
Defensive Depth 
Seems on the pfsense board this book is not receiving very positive reviews for accuracy. Has this been addressed? Are there updates to fix the errors? The official pfsense book is still in the works and I am looking for something to fill the gap.
“This book is about what I would expect for something written by someone who has no involvement with the project, and technical reviewed by people who have minimal experience with the project. The author and all the reviewers seem to have solid experience and qualifications, just not the level of expertise with pfSense and the amount of knowledge of its development needed to write or properly technical review a really well done book. Some of the features are described completely wrong, it lists at least one feature that doesn’t actually exist (wasn’t finished, was removed months ago), it shows examples that simply won’t work, and throws in a whole lot of screenshots of various things with accompanying description that’s frequently little or nothing more than paraphrasing the description in the GUI (see the sample chapter for instance). “
LikeLike
Thanks for your comment Alex. The post you are referring to is here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=35736.0
My response:
“I was one of the technical reviewers of this book–I was asked to review it not only because of my background with pfsense (I run it in production, and have blogged about it), but my network security background also….
This was my first time being the technical editor of a book, and I have to say that I am also a little disappointed with the outcome, as it seems that alot of my corrections & suggestions didn’t seem to make it to the final product. I also commented to packt that I was disappointed that they seemed to be trying to meet there page quota by throwing in random screenshots.
-Josh”
LikeLike