Keeping up with new technologies is important to stay relevant in software engineering. There’re many ways to go about it and then there are some secret ways! Reviewing preprint manuscripts of technical books is a very effective way to keep up-to-date with the latest technology and to give something back to the community simultaneously.

Here’re some reasons why I think reviewing technical books for publishers is worth it.

1. Learn and stay on the top of your game—It’s needless to say that reading books and trying out example code is good way to learn new technologies such that they stick longer.
2. Grow your professional network—You can connect with the author(s) and many times with other reviewers who have passion for technology similar to you. Most publishers have forums to discuss the books under review.
3. Influence. Make impact—There’s a good chance that a thorough, good quality review improves the book before it hits the shelves. It’s not much different from code review. You get to improve something while being part of its creation.
4. Become known—There’s a 100% chance that your name will be somewhere in the book if you completed the review. Sometimes there’s a bonus! If you praise the book and the publisher likes it, you might end up on the book’s web-page and on the back-cover. For instance, here’s my quote about Functional Programming in C++.
5. Socialize. Write blogs. Give talks—Yeah, you can talk about your contributions to the project, blog about it, help spread the book you helped create. There are many students, professionals, and casual learners who benefit from a balanced commentary about competing technical books in the same area. Writing/Talking about it helps it stick.
6. Give back to the technical community—This is important. You know that. How many times a stackoverflow answer/comment has saved you hours or possibly days of debugging? Reviewing technical books is a systematic way to give back to the technical community and share your expertise.
7. Learn to deliver on a tight deadline—More often than not, book reviews have a tight deadline. For many of the books below, I reviewed over 200 pages in 2/3 weeks time, mostly working on the weekends. That’s tough but I learned a lot in a really short time. Secondly, it’s a commitment to the publisher. Finishing a quality job on time helped me get more book reviews subsequently. What’s not to like about that?
8. Get a paper copy of the book for free—If you are a book hoarder like me, you might like to have a copy of the book you helped create. By the way, your name will be inside!
9. Write your own book—May be after reviewing enough books for others, you might get inspired to write your own. Writing a book is probably 100x more work than reading a nearly finished work.

I enjoy reviewing new technical books. Over the years, I’ve reviewed many manuscripts for publishers such as Manning and Packt. Here’s a list of books I helped create.

If you think I can add value to your book, contact me on Linkedin.