Would You Use an Online Library?

Posted by Cliff on Friday April 16, 2004 @07:45AM from the tossing-away-your-library-card dept.

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?"

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buy a few books, google / mls for the rest by DamienMcKenna · 2004-04-16 07:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

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