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Would You Use an Online Library?
langeland asks: "I have a friend who is selling subscriptions to an online library of computer literature (for example Books 24x7 or O'Reilly's Safari). He's trying hard to convince me that a library of 3000 books on anything from introductions to various programming languages and reference books to Windows 2003 Server, or MySQL is actually useful. I don't get it - nobody would read a whole book online anyway, so they can only be useful for trouble shooting ad hoc problems (or am I wrong here?). I'm thinking Google is a lot faster for solving problems at the busy job, and you'll probably find good plain web references on most technologies and stick with them. The price for a subscription to Books 24x7 is 400$ a year/seat! Do You have experience with these online libraries? Are they useful and worth the money?"
Well, it's nice to have physical books, but sometimes space is a concern. In comparison, a virtual library is MUCH smaller to store. Also compare the costs of all of those books to the price for the subscription and it comes out cheaper in the long run. Still, preference would go a long way towards if you'd even consider it in the first place.
at $400/seat/year, Google does just fine for me. Wikipedia as well. Google information is *MAYBE* a week old, whereas your friend's information is probably at least 100x that. That's what's so greate about the internet, information always gets updated.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
My recommendation is to buy some _good_ books for the core technologies you use and use a combination of web sites (via google), mailing lists and IRC for the rest. Books are your best source for how to do things right, mailing lists and IRC are your best source for what to do when it doesn't work right.
Just my $0.02 from doing this for a few years.
Damien
and didn't get that much value from it. I was able to Google the information I needed. Cancelled my subscription after 3 months...
I would use a searchable library for reference, but I wouldn't pay $400 a year when Google already works as a good reference for most answers. Amazon has that new "Search Inside the Book" that might end up being useful, but honestly most of the information I need is when something doesn't work. Google it real quick and the answer is usually there. I don't want to read a whole book on the subject for the most part. Maybe it has something to do with that "short attention span and brain damage" randomly shuffling my brain.
all the way through. "The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins and "An Oblique Approach" by David Drake. Both were available to download for free. I read both on my lap top and it took a really long time- I had to have free time, my laptop powered up and be somewhere it was convenient. I would say it took twice as long as if they had been printed copies.
For reference material- the stuff I use the most I print out and put into binders (Like all my PostgreSQL manuals) I have "Unix in a Nutshell" on CD and in print. I use the print version almost exclusively. Even without a searching tool I can find stuff faster.
Last but not least- I don't care what the value of all the thousands of books is compared to the cost of the subscription. What is the difference between what the subscription costs and the cost of the books I would have bought or needed? Factor in the lack of usability and that price difference needs to be huge. It still isn't for any such services I've looked at.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
*disclaimer safari subscriber*
I used to buy the animal books on several topics, mostly perl programming
Then I got the safari subscription
imagine this:
oreilly comes up with fourth edition of dns and bind
I have paper third edition of dns and bind
I use safari to get fourth edition, and I don't need the paper one anymore.
Since a lot of the animal books I use are very sucessful, and get updated every so often, just because I can replace one edition with the next at no charge, I save a bundle of money, provided I don't need hardcopy of the work in question, the web interface to it might actually save me time(mostly searching, although with practice, the internal binary-page search is pretty damn hard to beat, it's the "read entire TOC" that takes a while.)
Of course, I've been known to read entire online volumes on topics I was less familiar with(I can't say I'd do it with something like the perl cookbook) but so far, Safari is working out for me.
I subscribe to O'Reilly's Safari, and find it a really helpful resource.
Being able to search through a bunch of books and see problems from multiple angles is a really cool thing.
Yes, it's all on Google... but I think that the quality of information in published books is often better and is very convenient to find.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I had a subscription to Safari about 8 months ago. I only kept it for 2 months, but while I had it, it was pretty useful.
At the time, I was trying to "expand" my skillset, so I got to have access to several virtual books on one subject - for the same price as one physical copy. I also kept a few reference books in my virtual library - again, cheaper than having a hard copy sitting in the shelf.
In the end, it was only useful for me while I was learning new things - I didn't see it as a long-term solution.
Of course, it's always a matter of balancing the price they ask with the value you get...
dakkar - mobilis in mobile
Our company did a pilot with Books24x7, and I found it to be incredibly useful.
I thought the same thing you did, but while I was using it I had a revelation: I read alot of crap online already. Being a programmer/analyst/support rep, having a computer library on my computer was far more logical than having the 5 shelves of books behind me. They had some problems... They lacked Photoshop books (in recent versions anyway), and others of their books were a little out of date (though my bookshelves behind me are far more out of date). But even with those deficiencies, I found the service very useful. The search capabilities were excellent. In a technical crisis, I used it to solve a problem and it proved far faster with a lower "signal to noise ratio" than Google or other internet searches. I wouldn't have dreamed of going through the 30 books behind me in a crisis.
During the pilot I read two books nearly cover to cover (I skipped a couple of chapters with the click of a mouse). But I was also able to gather snippits of very good information out of about 40 of the books they had related to my job. The efficiency improvement would be worth $400 a year.
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
> I use safari to get fourth edition, and I don't need the paper one anymore.
And do you really need every new edition?