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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.'"
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.
Actually, I have found their willingness to extend into new areas rather interesting. Take for instance their exploration into bioinformatics. I wrote a review for one their bioinformatics texts here and found it to be rather useful. How many intro to bioinformatics textbooks are there? I'll answer that. Not many, and their text was a good start and quite useful for many universities interested in starting a program in bioinformatics.
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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
'Linux Device Drivers', 'DNS and BIND', 'the Linux Kernel' and the Apache reference are close enough to definitive for me. even better 'Linux Device Drivers (and others) are published under the GDL (documentation).
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I think the Perl books were they're..
they're = they are
sorry, couldn't help it..
bookpool.com dude, cheapest prices out there and if you order more than one or two books at a time the shipping is less that sales tax would have been... of the 30 or 40 ora books sitting on my shelves, probably 75% of them came from bookpool.
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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Join Safari.Oreilly.com; for as little as $10 a month you can have 5 "book points" (each book in your "bookshelf" is worth 1 points, some big ones are 2 pts.) I've had it for about 6 months now, and have read a LOT of books I otherwise wouldn't have bought. Plus, with a bit of effort (and some diminishment in quality (i.e. page #s, no index) you can cut-and-paste all of the HTML in your word processor and then go print it on your company and/or school's printers. (Tip: Print 2-pages per side, double sided, the books take up 1/4 of the space)