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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.'"
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
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.
>>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.
I agree that ORA books have been getting a wee bit more expensive lately. But I don't really think the quality of their content is slipping.
ADW has been putting out quality books for years. In some cases the books are better than ORA's. Though they're a bit dryer in content and style.
WROX and MS Press? I guess that we all have our tastes. If they work for you, then go for it. Personally, I have a hard time reading both. The typesetting is hard to read. And the books themselves...just look cheap. ORA's are easy to read and have a touch of class to them.
In the case of WROX, my past experience with them has been that their books are full of tecnical errors. More than the average textbook. If someone can confirm that their quality has improved, I'll start looking at their books again.
Huh?
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.
Last I checked NOTHING was "definitive", even the big thousand-plus-page books that you could break your back carrying. There's always more information than a book can possibly hold, and more ways to present it than you can shake a stick at. (And we know how Slashdotters love to shake sticks.)
OReilly books aren't definitive, but they do a damned good job of covering the bases and then some--and most importantly, they're written in a concise lucid manner that's hard to come by in tech books where too many people's brains are fried from long hours and one too many tubs of Penguin mints.
I have a number of non OReilly books sitting on my bookshelf, they probably outnumber the OReilly books--and they're great. No complaints. But the books that are on my desk day in and day out are the ones with funny little animals on the covers, and nearly everything I need to know between the covers.
Generally, what an OReilly book doesn't cover, I can find out with a few minutes of research on the internet, and all those other great books I have? Unfortunately they collect dust most of the time.
(The only non-OReilly book currently on my desk is the ever-present PHP Developer's Dictionary--SAMS)
-Sara
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;
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
I can confirm this. I found bookpool.com and they have by far the cheapest prices on technical books, they were really consistently at least a couple bucks cheaper than Amazon.com's prices (which are usually pretty similar to on-the-shelf prices) and I'm sure their shipping charges change, but I got some books from them recently where it was (I think) free shipping if you ordered over $50.
Also, in some cases the differences in their prices and bookstores off-the-shelf prices were really dramatic, like one of the books I ordered from them, The Art of Electronics, is ~$70 in any bookstore and about the same on Amazon, but they sold it for only $50. That is an awesome discount.
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