In response to my dissatisfied blurbing on SQL: Visual Quickstart Guide, I got the following delightfully snotty email from its author:

Dear Emma (who has always been big on reading),

Your review of my book — which, by the way, contains almost no screenshots — isn’t surprising, considering the caliber and attention to detail of your other reviews. (Slashdot is the perfect forum for them.) I confess that I didn’t make it through your "Mac OS X: Missing Manual" review
completely; it wasn’t, as you might suspect, the 20-odd occurrences of the word "I", but the phrase "It seems pretty definitely" that made me click through it.

That’ll learn me! Although I haven’t actually written a full-fledged review of Fehily’s Quickstart guide, it’s nice to know he cares. (I was pretty awful about his book - but it’s a pretty awful book.) It’s probably worth noting at this point that each of the three times I’ve written critically on a technical book, the author has made a point of contacting me to comment bitchily on my writing, my haircut, or Slashdot and its readership. I wonder, do you spend as much time making sure the reviewers know how you feel about your good reviews?

Of course, Fehily could have said that my complaints don’t really pertain specifically to his book at all but are rather an indication that I’m not the intended audience of the series, or he could have said that no style of book is for everyone and it’s no big deal that the Quickstart guides aren’t for me - both of which would have been true, and neither of which would have made him look like a jackass.