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25 Years of O'Reilly Books
wka writes "The year 2003 marks the 25th anniversary of publisher O'Reilly and Associates. O'Reilly has a site to mark the event. Readers can learn about the origin of the first animal covers in the time line, and read an anniversary message from Tim O'Reilly, stating his 'audacious' goal '[t]o change the world by capturing and transmitting the knowledge of innovators.'"
And thanks for all the high-quality books you provided throughout these 25 years and hopefully will continue to provide for a long time to come! :) They helped me solving a lot of problems! CHEERS! :-)
I think O'Reilly should make books comparing two different langauges, editors, computer topics. Why you ask? So they can show these crazy animals fighting it out on the cover. Wouldnt you love to see the Jave in a nut Shell Tiger beat up/eat the Dynamic HTML Flamingo? I thought so.
Grass-roots web hosting.We are poor colleg
Can't say I have any other book on my shelf. Fourteen in all (I just switched from Apache/mod_perl to Java/J2EE).
Each time I go get a new book, I check everything on the shelf. I *always* end up with a O'Reilly.
I think the Perl books were they're most crowning acheivements. All other Perl books were secondary to the O'Riely versions. I guess owning Mr. Wall didn't hurt in that respect :)
We even ran O'Reilly WebSite for a number of years with no complaints. Take that Microsoft! No IIS for us!
Congrats and Well Done to an icon of the industry.
*votes to change RTFM to RTFO'Reilly Book*
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When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
The book is considered definitive, and yet, the authors still answered the "little people"s questions. The first time that Randal Schwartz answered one of my perl questions in a newsgroup, I about fell outta my chair.
Sex - Find It
nt
Grass-roots web hosting.We are poor colleg
wget has served well.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
For a while O'Reilly was the premier book publisher for computer related topics. However if there latest offerings (going back at least 2 years) have been any indication, they have had mucho trouble attracting top writing talent.
Publishers like Manning, Wrox, and Microsoft Press have been able to offer books that blow away the competing O'Reilly books and at a fraction of the cost.
Also, it is important to note how fragile O'Reilly books are. The construction techniques leave much to be desired as pages frequently just fall out of the binding. This is a small minus, however, compared to the lack of quality content on those pages.
This is not to say that there aren't any good O'Reilly books, though. Most of their stuff published before 1999 was pretty good and their Perl coverage is second to none. However most other topics are pretty shabbily approached and the situation doesn't seem to be getting any better.
I have been pwned because my
I'm curious how many of us have an old UUCP or perhaps the first edition of Lexx/Yacc or some other now obsolete O'Reilly book
I also wonder how many of us proudly display an entire bookshelf full of them at work
Either way, here is a fun little parody to roll your own O'Reilly cover. Another fun one at O'Really. And a few images just for fun.
--- have you healed your church website?
They're going to celebrate by releasing the long-awaited book "O'Reilly Annoyances".
The only thing I can really contribute to this discussion is this:
:)
O'Reilly has some of the best books available on the topics covered. They have helped me enhance my skills more than any other source of information. When I need to learn something tech related, I always check ORA first to see if there's a book available.
My bookshelves at work and home are predominantly blue, pink, and green.
I can't thank them here properly, words don't really do the job. So I plan on continuing to buy their books. That's my thank you.
Huh?
I've always liked the O'Reilly books - good content at a decent price and very distinctive covers. Reminds me of all those math books from Dover Publications (http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mat hematics.html) - excellent math books at rock bottom prices and very distinctive covers.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
I have read O'Reilly Books for as long as I can remember at least 10 yrs. They are without question the best books on computer related technology, no one else comes close.
I don't remember where I've seen them though. Whatever the site was, it had a lot of interesting facts on the beginnings of O'Reilly and some pretty interesting stuff.
Without trying to sound like an advertisment, I've found O'Reilly's Safari service is ebooks over the web done RIGHT. They get your contribution which funds the library, you get cheap access to books that would otherwise cost you a lot more money legitimately. The only downside is that you don't get the geek-cred of having all of those animal books on your shelf at work.
Has anyone seen any other publishers offering a similar service that is as good value wise? I wasn't particularly impressed by the offering from Wrox but I'm guessing that someone else out there will follow O'Reilly's lead.
The O'Reilly timeline could have been really good with more listings on it. Top 1 or 2 books per year would have said a lot and demonstrated how the technologies bled into one another.
/.ers buy a lot of O'Reilly books and I also have mixed reviews. However my biggest problem with them is that they don't so enough updating between versions and as a result there books are often dated. Also they often contain too little information, probably because of the small side. On the plus side they don't give the same basic facts again and again and they don't have information that will be dated 3 months after the book is published as most of the larger books do.
Anyway I like just about
I think O'Reilly is great. Recently, I needed a book overnight for a Saturday delivery. I called every major bookstore in a 200 mile radius to see if they could get it for me by Saturday. No one could. O'Reilly got it to me.
Hats off to them.
You dumb fuck. There are no decimal numbers.
Do you know what kind of books O'Reilly publishes? I mean, I would understand your gripe if there was a post like "Rand McNally Celebrates 125 Years" or something, but not only is Tim O'Reilly an outspoken advocate of open source, but his company puts out some damn good books that I bet a LOT of slashdot readers own and benefit from. Were you joking about books being "antiquated forms of data transmission", or are we just seeing the results of your unfortunate opinions?
No doubt about it, you are most definitely a geek if you find this funny:
True in a Nutshell
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
the story of o'reilly is one that could really be taken to heart by a lot of linux geeks.
they had and have a great product, but the first thing to come to mind is the animal cover. consistency and simplicity, combined with a superior product, make remembering that excellence simpler, and expand the brand and usage / sales.
the moral? KISS, of course, but also, keep it consistent.
go get it
"Readers can learn about the origin of the first animal covers in the time line, and read an anniversary message from Tim O'Reilly"
Readers can also try to connect the dots to reveal a business strategy and help Tux the penguin find the fish at the end of the maze.
graspee
For making great books at popular prices; they helped me so much. Keep up the excellent work!
When it comes to pseudo-Computer Science related jobs like system administration or network engineering, Addison Wesley doesn't come through.
For real computer science and software engineering, AW is great. But for things like figuring out how to send naughty messages to all your users at once or resetting someone's password, O'Reilly rules the roost.
Yeah, well my goal was to have sex with Britney Spears. It's nice to know i'm not the only failure.
Gee i guess i shouldn't joke about something like O'Reilly books. People just don't seem to have a sense of humor any more. I expressed my opinion and got modded down cause i apparently insulted your god or something. For O'Reillys sake calm down.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
25 Years of O'Reilly Books!!! more like celda
You'll be doing 11 years hard time for selling state secrets to the Russian Commonwealth.
I enjoyed their acount of the habits of the slender loris pictured on the cover of Sed and Awk. Yessir.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
mS press, youll only get information that they think you should be using, wrox and others are great for noobs. but once you get beyond beginner, you need oreilly. and theyll tell you plainly when a feature really suxxors from a product. too bad they they dont have many sql server books at oreilly that have recent info. the mictosoft press ones are good for simple review, but they will never tell you that using a particular feature that is just plain kludgy.
I think that the folks at O'Reilly should thank the creator that:
1. Documentation for unices and open source stuff sucks so unbelievably (except PostgreSQL)
2. Most authors of computer books are not substantially better writers than the folks who document unices and open source stuff.
Frankly, I find the O'Reilly books to be generally bland and mediocre, with a handful of particularly good and bad titles.
However: in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king and thus, I suppose, even I'm thankful for O'Reilly. But I really wish that a truly good publisher of computer books would come along! Boy does the Unix/Open Source movement need this!
..I'm going to code some software named NUTS.
Then, I shall bribe O'Reilly to unleash the ultimate monstrosity upon you all.
NUTS in a Nutshell.
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAhahahAHhahahHAhaha.
And after using them to begin two languages, it's now the first thing I look for. Consistently good series. Congrats, guys.
+5 Funny, c'mon mods!
I've been a unix system administrator for about 10 years now. In fact, I've never had another professional job outside of system administration. And I owe *all* of it to O'Reilly. Their books launched my career, and made me what I am today. I've paid full cover price for my entire library several times over (new editions, you know) but they deserve a larger chunk of my salary than that. Congratulations, and keep up the good work!
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;
... to Prentice Hall's effort to open-source a series of technical books.
Prentice Hall & Perens vs Oreilly & Safari. Now that's a matchup I'd like to see.
I wanted to say Happy Anniversery to Tim and O'Reilly books. I have really enjoyed the content and quality of the O'Reilly books I have purchased. The books I have so far:
Learning The Vi Editor
MP3, The Definitive Guide
Learning The Bash Shell (Bash on NetBSD is great!)
Practical C Programming
HTML & XHTML
TCP/IP Network Administration
Securing Windows NT/2000 Servers for the Internet
Now if he would just print a book on NetBSD! (Oops, I forgot; BSD is dying!)
barnes and noble STILL can't be arsed to put all the o'reilly books in one display. so i have to sit there for an hour trying to find the specific one i'm looking for amoung a million wanna-be's.
oh well.
I have 25 +/- O'Reilly books on my shelves. They are usually quite good, but I've had a few disapointments lately. Practical PostgreSQL does not cover embedded SQL in C/C++ and has a terrible index (only 6 pgs long). They chose to waste nearly 50 pgs of material on some unknown commercial add-on pkg that the authors had written. The penultimate book I bought - Java and XSLT - has a good discussion of the basics with examples, but is a terrible reference if you just want to see what the standard XPATH node set functions are (i.e. count() is available in an example, but what else might there be?). Instead they chose to include 40 pgs on java servlet basics that can already be found in 20 other books. For the XPATH stuff, I finally bought their XSLT book just to get the reference text I needed.
I suspect that they are just overwhelmed by the volume of material that needs coverage these days and their editors don't know the material well enough to tell authors what should be included and what should be left out. I hope it isn't because they have fallen for the latest fad delivered at internet speed business model where it is more more important to ship code at all than to pause for a moment and check the code's quality.
They are still up there (along with Prentice-Hall and Addison Wesley) as best of breed in programming books, but I think that I will be a little more careful about comparison shopping first instead of just automatically reaching for the O'Reilly version.
FreeSpeech.org
ORA is pop-science for computer dilettantes.
No wonder their books are so popular with BSD users.
O'Reilly's "Running Linux" (Welsh and Kaufman, authors) is one of my "must-have" books. I have 3 copies -- one on my desk at work, one on my bookshelf at home, and one at my girlfriend's place. (Just in case!)
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
I learnt Java with Exploring Java and C with Practical C. I have so many ORA Java books now I don't know what to do with them. I found the ADW Java books to be very good as well but incredibly difficult and dry. O'Reilly books are usually human, and that is what often makes the difference.
I quote from Exploring Java: An event can be a pressing a key on the keyboard, moveing the mouse or banging ones's head against the monitor.
Isn't this the sort of thing that we all feel sometimes in this profession of ours?
Its disgusting that O Rielly make's money off Linux and the work of genius like Linux and Larry.
All these books should be free as in money
for the crab TCP/IP book. That book set my career back a year. That was THE worst book on TCP/IP ever. I read it at the behest of my employer in 1996. Anybody remember the atrocious subnetting section? Ugh. I was a neophyte at the time, and I thought the problem was with me.
why do you need books when youve got the man page and teh src?
you need a $50 book to work mysql? LAME!
i admin all my boxen without wasting $$$$. all i need is man and other linux gurus on irc
They should start making books about animals but put engravings of computers on the front.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
This is a work in progress right?
Perhaps a book that will never be quite finished.
Today, Internet is 20 years old. So Oreilly 5 years older than the Internet. Huh?
What animal is on the cover of "Surviving the Slashdot Effect"?
Table-ized A.I.
At work, WROX books usually sit on the desks of people that are the most clueless. Their size is often ridiculous. Like trying to say: see, it's a really big book, I know a lot. Finally, I find their covers really really bad. I understand how flattering it must be for the authors, but it's of the worst taste. It's not Oprah magazine, people. It's a tech book!
Wanna try some cool books: try out New Riders. I own 2 of their 'Essential Reference' titles and they're both excellents. The Jakob Nielsen book is also a classic. Give them a shot.
there's no place like ~
it is at least for a reason. They *open flat.*
Not only are the "eight hundred pound gorilla" books generally inferior to the O'Reilly offerings, but you have to break their "studier" bindings to make them actually usable at the keyboard.
I bless O'Reilly every day for this little, and for them more expensive to produce, nicety, even if the odd page does fall out of some of the older and more well thumbed volumes.
KFG
pink books. I also have brown books, mint books an orange book and one book that doesn't really have any color at all.
Yeah, I've got a couple red books and a handful of "bumble bee" books from the "other guys," but none of them are day to day usable like the O'Reillys. Even where I've found the odd book a bit superior for first contact with a particular subject it's the O'Reilly's that end up being my prefered reference down the road.
But most of all no other computer tech books give me the pure *pleasure* of O'Reilly books. I love books. I've always loved books. When I was two and could first answer on my own the question, " What would you like for your birthday?" I said, "Books!"
O'Reilly books aren't just manuals. They're honest to goodness, God almighty *Books.* No one else seems quite able to pull this off ( although New Riders is starting to get close).
If I could only take one tech book to a desert island it would be an O'Reilly because they're the only books of the genre just plain worth *reading*.
KFG
if it worked that way, it would be called karma begging, not karma whoring.
The one thing that bugs me more than anything is when they don't have a book on what I'm looking for. It makes me sad and loose intrest in it. I want them to have a Fortran book. Someone who knows fortran write them a book. There is lots up new Engineers and Scientist out there who would like to learn fortran since it's important in their feild. There is so many things written in fortran. Though I think any fortran book would need to cover all versions of fortran. I just find it amazing they don't have one. My C and C++ O'reilly books need a shelf mate.
Also a Cobol book would be fun, found myself wanting to learn it for the hell of it, and a dinosour would be a must on the cover (maybe Bob the Dinosour, or Wally,(one looks like a COBOL programmer and the other is)). Same for Fortran I suppose.
I have an entire book case filled with my college text books (only those that corresponded to my major) and a few shelves of o'reilly books. i love my o'reilley books.
my o'reilly books have been my introduction to vast amounts of technology and are my day to day reference. easily, i can buy one o'reilly book per month (which i usually do) and stay 5 steps ahead of my co-workers, 10 steps ahead of other fellow students, and 1 step ahead of my college professors.
here is to another 25 years of o'reilly!
kha0z
Master of ImportChaos.com
Sorry to dis' everyone's favorite publisher, but I fail to see how they can claim this is their 25th anniversary since their timeline admits their first publication was in 1986 which is only 17 years back. The twenty five figure marks Tim's introduction to unix, which is not quite the same thing as O'Reilly is it?
We would all be lost in the dark considering all the aspects of computing that exist now if it were not for the big O. Congrats!
Interesting that Microsoft doesn't rate a single mention in the timeline. Although O'Reilly has always been more in tune with the worlds of Unix and Open Source, this is still interesting. Does this reveal anything of their opinion of their own books on Microsoft software?
God bless Dover. They also publish positively oodles of other great stuff for next to nothing.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I have the pleasure to meet Mr O'Reilly in one of his speaking event. It was an insightful and throught provoking event. What set O'Reilly and other publisher apart is that they are truely interested in technology and even take a stance on issues (such as Amazon's 1-click patent). Many times I visit a book store I go straight to O'Reilly rack. Can't say every book has consistent highest quality. But at least they are thinner that other competitor's book and waste less paper on dumb topics. Keep on! We will continue to explore the world of technology together!
It spends half the book talking about standard Unix commands. If I wanted an "incomplete intro to Unix book" I'd buy that.
That isn't to say the book has no content, but I'm tired of that same old junk being covered in every O'Rilley book. The fact it was in the bioinformatics book was just sad.
> This is a work in progress right?
That's probably true for any OS, though more so for Windows.
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts
those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds
of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end
goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger,
and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works,
the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found
the last bug."
-- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
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