From: Pat Villani
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 1997 9:06 AM
To: letters@ercb.com
Subject: FreeDOS Kernel Review
Hi Ray,
Just ran across your review of my book. Thanks for the positive review.
I agree with your comments regarding the timeliness of the book and the FreeDOS project in general. It did come too late to be of any impact on the industry. Unfortunately, I was discouraged by many individuals when I first presented the MS-DOS clone in 1990. I was nearly convinced to drop the book and DOS-C had it not been for the FreeDOS community. Had I gone with my gut and ignored the neigh-sayers, the code would have been released in 1991 with the book quickly following. It would have been very interesting ...
I get a number of inquiries from embedded developers regarding DOS-C and embedded applications. There are now a few systems running DOS-C and I charge no royalties for these commercial applications. Embedded developers are probably the group that will most benefit from the book and the code. There are missing DOS-C features such as multi-tasking and memory file systems that they could benefit from but they generally do not seem to miss them.
I have one question regarding readability. In your opinion, what areas should I improve in order to become more readable? this was my first book and I'm currently working on another. I appreciate any and all feedback that will help me improve the next book.
Pat Villani
patv@unx.dec.com
From: Berney Williams
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 1997 1:42 PM
To: letters@ercb.com
Subject: RE: FreeDOS Review
Greeting Ray,
Having just read your web site review of Pat Villani's FreeDOS Kernel, I would like to prevail on you to adivse me a bit more on your critique. We are always trying to improve the quality of our publishing efforts and would appreciate your instruction on the production criticism. In your star rating system you ranked the editing and design as marginal, after making the following observations:
"The design and editing are kitchen-table-desktop-publishing quality, . . . . It's interesting to speculate on what a radically different treatment this book might have received if it had fallen into the hands of Andrew Schulman when he was acquiring books for [the or his] Programming Series at Addison-Wesley."I would be very interested in the details of your speculation about what Addison Wesley would have done, and seriously would like to know the details of your critical assessment of the design and editing.
Please do not feel that this is a "sour grapes" inquiry. I am seriously trying to build a reputable and reliable publishing enterprise for advanced software developers and would benefit from some specifics in elaboration of your criticisms.
On the marketing front, you may be encouraged to know that we are as agressively as possible promoing Pat's book to the embedded systems programmers, although as you say "R&D's marketing resources are limited."
Please share a deeper level of detail with me on your criticism.
Berney Williams
Acquisitions Editor
R & D Books/Miller Freeman Inc.
It's always great to get feedback from authors and publishers about our reviews. We hope to establish ERCB as a place where readers, authors, and publishers can meet and discuss technical books on -- so to speak --- a level playing field.
With regard to Berney Williams' letter, however, we do not have the time or resources to engage in lengthy "what if" dialogues on any particular book. We must simply call them as we see them, and then move on.
-- Ray Duncan