Is the Book "Camel in Action" Outdated?

As you may know Jonathan and I were published about 1.5 years ago with the Camel in Action book.

The book has been well received within the community, and it has helped a lot of people beginning to ride the Camel.

Jonathan and I have done our best to keep the material in the book as up to date to the latest Camel release. In fact, during the type-setting period (that takes four months) we ensured that material was updated accordingly to new Apache Camel releases. So when the book went into production it was up to date with the Apache Camel 2.5.0 release from October 31, 2010.

Ever since the book was published, we have been active on the Author Online forum to catch the minor mistakes and feedback you may have. The errata of the book is fully up to date. In fact the errata was updated as recently as a couple of months ago.

Likewise, the accompanying source code of the book has been kept up to date with the newer Camel releases. Up until the latest official release 2.9.2. And this time we have prepared the source code for the upcoming Camel 2.10 release (currently expected to be GA next week).

I myself, as a reader of other books, see this kind of service as rare. Most authors do not bother to even keep an errata, or make sure their source code actually works.

In fact, we use the source code for the book as a test suite for the upcoming Apache Camel releases. In fact, due to the source code, we caught a regression in the 2.10 release. Then we fixed it and recut a new release candidate.

So with that in mind, its sad to see a reader post a bad review on Amazon (Click on image to read).

Our first 1-star review

For example, the reader complains that he/she cannot find the Apache Camel 2.5.0 download. Well, because of Apache policy older releases are not highlighted on the website. But they are available in the Apache Archives. If you click on the download link on the Camel website, we have a heading in the top that reads "Older Releases." So now it's easier to find.