Oh, yes. Now, I’m not a huge Slashdot fan in general. Not because there aren’t quality news items, reviews, and other geek stuff on there. In fact, there is. I just grew tired a long time ago of having to scroll through page after page of troll comments in order to find any comments of value. In other words, frustrating=5 (if you’ve never used Slashdot, you won’t understand that joke…)

However, today, I had reason to be pleased with Slashdot (a MySQL-run site BTW!), because a review of Mike Kruckenberg and my book, Pro MySQL hit the book review list. Now, granted, it is over a full year since we published the book, but hey, who’s paying attention to that anyway…?

The Slashdot Effect is a term used by my editor, Jason Gilmore, and many others in the publishing and marketing community, to describe the incredible surge of visibility that comes with a review on Slashdot. They weren’t joking. Yesterday, Pro MySQL‘s rank on Amazon’s top-seller list was over 350,000. Today, we crested at #825. Talk about an effect!

On a funnier note, I responded to the following humorous comment, left by RalphTheWonderLlama:

Is that guy’s name really Pipes? It’s like a bad pron name only this is a bad programmer name.

My response:

Yes, unfortunately, my name really is Jay Pipes 🙂 I suppose me being a programmer is better than me going into the plumbing business, which unfortunately my father was in for 30 years. No joke.