Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Wired Magazine Profile of Tim O'Reilly

Posted by Zonk on from the i-wish-i-had-radar dept.

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."

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. and Tim has a blog by acomj · · Score: 4, Informative

    Tim Oreilly has a blog...

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

    the other posters are interesting as welll

    http://radar.oreilly.com/

  2. Re:Quality Lasts by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  3. SNR by Hans+Lehmann · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
  4. Re:Quality Lasts by Varitek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.