Wired Magazine Profile of Tim O'Reilly

An anonymous reader writes "Best-selling author Steven Levy has a new profile of techincal publisher Tim O'Reilly over at Wired." From the article: "... O'Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow. O'Reilly books tend to colonize entire sections at Borders and Barnes & Noble, their distinctive cover design as recognizable as the Tide circle on a box of detergent or the Apple logo on the lid of a PowerBook. In serif type over a glossy white background, there is the title, often naming a computer language or protocol familiar to codeheads and gibberish to everyone else (JavaServer Faces; Essential CVS; Using Samba, 2nd Edition). The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals."

Comments

and Tim has a blog

[acomj]

Tim Oreilly has a blog...

http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/

the other posters are interesting as welll

http://radar.oreilly.com/

I think most nontechies know him as someone else..

[Doom bucket]

Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing company.

If you asked my parents they would think of the loudmouthed guy with a TV show. I'm sure they've never heard of the publishing company... in any case not everybody who is "techie" knows about O Reilly, I didn't until about two years ago, or at least I was aware of the books but never bought one.

Re:Quality Lasts

[Doc Ruby]

I think the "Camel" book, and Perl itself, are examples of successful products in general. They're products that are produced to meet people's demand for something, not a result of people's ability to produce something. In other words, give the people what they want, not just what you want to give them. The other O'Reilly books I've used, including _Unix in a Nutshell_, _Java in a Nutshell_ and other "Nutshell" books have all seemed to have that provenance. The K&R book, and C itself, as well. I think the "demand, not supply" design principle applies to all those products, and practically all the others I like.

Not, pen and ink, but woodcuts

[Anonymous Coward]

The animals on the covers are not pen-and-ink, they are based on 19th century woodcuts.

SNR

[Hans Lehmann]

As an engineer, I'll put this in engineering terms; O'Reilly books have a high signal to noise ratio. The amount of useful information that they contain per inch of shelf space is equaled by no other publisher, period.

Quality: Addison Wesley, PTR

[DavidNWelton]

Some of the O'Reilly books are really good, especially the Perl one mentioned above, but over the years, I've found the composition of my bookshelf shifting from the O'Reilly manual/tutorial/reference style books to a broader range of things, including more "classics", many of which come from Addison Wesley and PTR (see below for a gratuitous Amazon-spamming:-). O'Reilly seems to produce books that are really good at covering "today's hot buzzword" well, giving you a good overview of the technology, and enough in-depth knowledge to get what you need done. However (and only time will tell if I'm right), this approach seems to produce books that have a more limited shelf life, compared to something like Knuth, K&R, SICP and the like. In any case, I love books...I'd buy tons of them if I had the money!

• About Face 2.0
• Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
• Algorithms in C
• The C Programming Language : ANSI C Version
• C++ Programming Language 3RD Edition Special Edition
• Expert C Programming : Deep C Secrets
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Learning Python
• Linkers & Loaders
• Linux Device Drivers
• Operating Systems : Design and Implementation
• Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, 4th Edition
• The Practice of Programming
• Programming With Posix Threads
• Python Essential Reference 2ND Edition
• Running Linux
• The Scheme Programming Language : ANSI Scheme
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Unix for the Impatient
• Unix Network Programming, Volume 1, 2nd Edition.
• Unix Network Programming, Volume 2, 2nd Edition.

Re:Quality Lasts

[Varitek]

An even better way of remebering - the capital letter that begins each word looks like that camel. A Bactrian has two humps, and a Dromedary has one.

those distinctive covers use public domain art

[jacobito]

IP geeks may be interested to know that the illustrations on O'Reilly's covers are generally public domain works from the Dover pictorial archive. Dover Publications, if you don't know, is an invaluable publishing house that specializes in budget-priced literature and art books (especially clip art); many, perhaps most, of their publications use public domain material.

(As an aside, you may also be interested to know that their clip art collections aren't entirely unemcumbered -- while the individual works are public domain, their collections are copyrighted derivative works, and they place limits on commercial use of art from their collections.)

Re:those distinctive covers use public domain art

[tadghin]

While we began our animal covers using Dover clip art, we didn't end there. We now have a large collection of 19th century books containing original woodcuts (the same source that Dover used to build their collections). In addition, a number of the illustrations are contemporary. We have found people (notably Lorrie Lejeune) who were able to make pen and ink images that matched the woodcut style. See if you can identify the contemporary images without looking at the Colophon...

Some good stuff in Wired.

[Civil_Disobedient]

I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though.

There have been some diamonds in that sea of coal. As you mention later on, the article "Mother Earth Motherboard" was possibly the greatest technical/historical article ever written. Here's Wired's copy. Here's another. And another.