Slashdot Mirror
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
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*
---
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
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?
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.
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.
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
'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
Yeah, well my goal was to have sex with Britney Spears. It's nice to know i'm not the only failure.
Pah! Amateur :-) Having just counted up, I have 51
of thier books. In all of those, there's only one that
I feel really doesn't match the quality of the
rest, and that's Power
Programming with RPC. To this day, I still
can't work out why they published it, when it's
so obviosuly not up to scratch. But among the
rest, there are some real gems, covering most of
my favourite geeky subjects. And of course, the
X11 books are indispensable...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I enjoyed their acount of the habits of the slender loris pictured on the cover of Sed and Awk. Yessir.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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
And after using them to begin two languages, it's now the first thing I look for. Consistently good series. Congrats, guys.
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 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!)
Personal preference I guess.
:)
I always read through the books on the shelf in the category that I'm looking for...I stand there for hours until my feet hurt
It was hard to not get a few of the Sun Java books.
The Rox Press books are good too.
But, there is just something about the O'Reilly books that my brain can digest.
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
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!)
-----
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?
They should start making books about animals but put engravings of computers on the front.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
all i need is man and other linux gurus on irc
Preferrably Linux gurus with $50 books near by.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
What animal is on the cover of "Surviving the Slashdot Effect"?
Table-ized A.I.
I agree with you. O'Reilly books are very good but i still go to the library and skim a few other books on the topic. Also once you know a topic the O'Reilly book on the subject is probably the best thing to use as a reference.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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
*laughs* I'm a girl. I don't NEED to know anything between the covers. :p
:p That is something one CAN learn from OReilly books.
Besides, if a girl were to go to bed with a Slashdot goon, all she'd have to do is whisper Linux commands, and he'd be in heaven.
-Sara
San Diego Technical Books puts all the O'Reillys under one shelf. They have a great selection; I drove all the way from SoCal to buy an O'Reilly book and didn't regret it one bit.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
That may be a store to store thing. The one barnes and noble by me has them all together now, they didn't before. Though the University owned one does not. They scamble them everywhere. But at least the Uni owned one has more titles. But yeah, when the arn't in one spot it's a pain. I'm one to just go for the O'reilly book on the topic i'm interested in and buy it without looking at others. I can read the book in the time saved.
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.
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?
The problem is that you can't always tell by a quick leaf through in the store. It isn't until you try and do something that you start to find out what was missing. However, the editors at O'Reilly aren't bad, and it is a good bet to grab one.
However, you can miss a lot of other good books if you only buy O'Reilly.
See my journal, I write things there
> This is a work in progress right?
That's probably true for any OS, though more so for Windows.