O’Reilly’s Safari
I recently signed up for O'Reilly's Safari digital book service (http://safari.oreilly.com/) for a trial period to see how well it worked for me. I've had it for barely over a week, and I really like it.
I own a lot of O'Reilly books. Many of them are out-of-date... my Apache book is v1, my Sendmail book is not only out-of-date, I don't run Sendmail anymore. I know some of my Perl books have been revised.
Computer books have this problem of becoming obsolete quickly... and when you're talking books that cost as much as $50, I find that I just don't buy books I'd like to have because they're a poor investment. And as the price of computer books has just gone up and up, I've bought fewer and fewer. And then I have books that I never got around to reading for various reasons. I have books that were read-once and don't need to be referenced again, but aren't worth much on the used market. And they take up a ton of space, when bookshelf space is at a premium around here.
Plus I have this other problem... if I own one Perl Cookbook, do I keep it at home or at work? I can't afford to buy two of all my computer books, but I don't feel like I can ask my employer to buy me hundreds of dollars worth of books to duplicate my personal library, either. But there have been several times that I needed to troubleshoot a Sendmail problem and my Sendmail book was in the wrong location.
So here I'm looking at this monthly-fee service that, at my level, lets me access ten books at a time online. If I want to read something not on my ten-book "bookshelf," I can remove a book that's been on my shelf for more than 30 days.
In addition, I get five free "download tokens" a month... I can download five chapters in PDF format for offline reference. Don't know how useful that is... but it does mean I can eventually collect the important chapters of books I reference often and clear that book off my bookshelf to make room for other books.
So I'm working my way through a Perl programming book, dipping into the Perl Best Practices book, skimming Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, and looking for network troubleshooting help in Network Troubleshooting Tools.
Oh, here was the clincher for me... Safari isn't just O'Reilly books. They've got Sams, Peachpit, New Riders, Que, Prentice Hall and more. I'm not buying into "O'Reilly and nothing but O'Reilly." Nevermind that I usually buy O'Reilly's books anyway, but it's nice that I can skim these other books and evaluate them without having to commit to buying them.