Should I stop doing errata?

I bought this book about a month ago, it's bad. See the early post from today. I have submitted at least 5 errata in the last two weeks. Not one has shown up on the website yet.

They include wrong commands, commands not matching the screen capture below it in the book, and commands with spaces in them, that really do not belong.

Xen Virtualization: The book - update

I decided to not build the last two xen boxes in chapter 3. So far the book has been a major disappointment. The author wasn't even trying in chapter 3. And I really wonder if the reviewers read the book.

Whole steps were left out while installing the NetBSD box, and instead of giving pointers to make things work during install, it was a case of oh just go read this web page on the NetBSD site.

Overall I'm very disappointed with the book.

The reading so far

So far, I'm 16 pages in, and have installed Xen on Fedora core 8. It's up and running dom0, but that's the extent of it. Next I'll learn how to install xen from source.

So far, I found one part that took me a second to realize what happened. They referred to system emulation on one page, and then referred to it again as hardware emulation after turning the page. Maybe a nitpick but I did file an errata on it.

Another thing, they're using FC6 in the book, I'm using FC8. When I did my yum install, yum install kernel-xen xen I got about 3 more packages than they said I would. I'm not complaining though. I figure it's a difference in the systems. The ifconfig screen capture left me scratching my head, I'm missing one of the interfaces they said I would see, and 2 of them are called something else. One command didn't work as advertised either. But again, that is probably a difference in the software vs when the book was written.

It's not fair to tear apart a book before you read it, is it?

Ok, I'll be fair. I've only made it 5 pages in to the book so far. Basically the TOC and the Preface. The last page of the TOC fell out already... It's a brand new book, just arrived today. I know sometimes the binding doesn't take well.

The other thing I saw that bothers me, after just thumbing through it at random, is the Typesetting. There are large sections of pages where they didn't put anything. You think you're at the end of the chapter, only to turn the page and get a paragraph that was too large for the previous page. Instead of carrying over, they mid paragraph, they move the whole paragraph to the next page. Which of course used up more space. Otherwise the book would probably only be 100 pages. (Well maybe not).

Lots of screen shots, and they drag text from the paragraph with them too.

Minor annoyance, they mention customer support in the preface, but then leave out all ways of contacting said group. Unless of course they mean the Errata and question sections on the next page, after the large gap at the bottom of the Customer Support page. Probably about 1/5 of the page. (The section between the boarders). They are also trying to get more writers in the preface too.

An O'Reilly book, it's not. I'll do a more proper update later, after reading more of it.