Review my book - Winners

After a painstaking analysis of the reasons why people wanted to review my book (well, Mark and my book...), I have selected 5 winners. To be objective, I came up with the following ranking factors:

1. Breadth of knowledge
2. Years of experience
3. Number of languages known
4. Previous review expertise
5. Whether their comment number matched the output of the RAND() function in Excel
6. Whether they would do a good review

After considerable thought, I decided on the following rankings:

1. 0.0%
2. 0.0%
3. 0.0%
4. 0.0%
5. 100.0%
6. 0.0%

But before I announce the winners, I'd like to address one comment, which said,

# Bribery doesn't seem ethical @ Friday, December 30, 2005 2:03 PM

Giving out free books seems to slant the reviews in your favor. I'm sure your book rocks, but why not let impartial observers post reviews through the normal process (buy the book first, then post a review)?

Well, anybody is certainly free to buy the book and then post a review. I'd be happy if you did that. I'd be happy if lots of people did that.

But it's a fact of life in the publishing business that publishers provide free books to reviewers. I could have requested that those books be sent to people who I know and who are in my target audience for the book. But I'd rather get a broader cross-section, which is why I decided to ask my readers.

Yes, the people who read my blog have some connection to me, but I don't think it's likely that they will consider themselves beholden just because they got a free book out of the deal. Especially if they got a free book that they didn't find very useful.

So, just to be clear, the only requirement is that you write an Amazon review. You can write other reviews if you like, and you can obviously say whatever you want in the review.

So, without further ado, the winners are:

I have email addresses for all of you that I will be passing onto Apress. You should hear from them soon.

For the rest of you, thanks for playing.