Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
*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.