My Experience as a Tech Reviewer

I recently got the chance to be a tech reviewer on Pro C# 9 with .NET 5 by Phil Japikse 

and Andrew Troelsen. It is a particularly informative book and goes thru all aspects of C# 9. If you were going to get one C#9 book, you should get that book. I got to see what goes into a book like this and I can tell you that it is well worth the price. 

Publishing a technical book is a lot of work. The authors need to know the subject matter inside and out. Writers know the subject matter so well that they can write about it in a way that is both educational and keeps the reader's attention. Editors must make sure there are absolutely no mistakes. Publishers must make sure everything is on time and on budget to make the book a success.

Then there are the tech reviewers. My job was to go thru chapters line by line and test it. I looked for technical typos and logic errors. I also tested the code that was in the written examples by putting that code in Visual Studio and running it. I tested the code in the code examples on Github by downloading it, running it and deeply analyzing it.

I came at the chapters to try and break them. I made no assumptions and followed the instructions. If a step were missing or could break something, I reported it. If something was wrong, no matter how minor, I reported.

This is not the first edition of the book. I'm not the only tech reviewer. I found it a challenge to find any bugs, but I did the work. I had fun with the challenge.

You might ask, why would you do this work for someone else's book? I did get paid some. I can't change my career to just reviewing books, but it was fine. Technical reviewing a book is a wonderful way to learn it. Analyzing C# from this perspective helped me learn new things. I enjoyed it.

It was a lot of work. The book I reviewed is over 1300 pages long. There were three tech reviewers but we each had several chapters to review. Because it has already been reviewed and the authors and editors were good, it was hard to find corrections. That did become frustrating at times. Caffeine became an even better friend to me.

Do you think you might want to be a tech reviewer?  Check out this link: Tech Reviewers