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

Quality Lasts

[Doc Ruby]

My O'Reilly _Programming perl_ book has survived unspeakable abuse for 10 years, without dropping a single page from its binding. While its content, layout and clarity of editorial is unparalleled in my three decades of paging through paper documentation, inviting thousands of hours of use. That's a quality product. Keep up the good work, Tim!

Re:Quality Lasts

[Doc Ruby]

FWIW, the fortune at the bottom of the page on which I submitted these messages reads:

"The camel has a single hump; The dromedary two; Or else the other way around. I'm never sure. Are you? -- Ogden Nash"

while the _Programming perl_ book's colophon says "the animal featured on the cover of Programming Perl is a camel, a one-humped dromedary", then refers to "the one-humped dromedary and the two-humped bactrian". Even Ogden Nash could have learned something useful from that handy O'Reilly edition.

Re:Quality Lasts

[Comatose51]

You know, ever since reading that book, I've come to this silly notion that there might be other books like it. That's very, very rare. Maybe C the Programming Language is close. Most other programming books just can't strike a balance between being indepth but also to the point. I was reading a book on WMI the other day and the author proceed to explain the history of WMI! He started with SNMP and then DMI, etc. then he explains why schema, etc. What I wanted wasn't until most of the way through the book and even that chapter wasn't very good. I ended up just Googling and found the one example everyone provides for creating WMI providers. The code was maybe 3 pages long but that's all it took for me to do what I needed.

The Perl book was like those 3 pages with commentaries but for a few hundred pages instead. Even though Perl's philosophy is TIMTOWTDI, the book somehow manages to forsee any problems or questions that I would even up having as I read along. It gave a lot of details with useful examples but still managed to keep it all very central and never felt like he was straying from the topic. I got started on Perl with only some reading over dinner (I started, not mastered Perl at that point). Maybe it was Perl that made it so easy. I don't know. It was very amazing in retrospect. I still have that book and it was one of a small box of books I took with me when I moved after college even though I don't program in it anymore. That book is legendary.

Re:Quality Lasts

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly legendary to me... I got my start with Perl while working as a student SA in college. My boss threw that book on my desk and said "We need a script written to do [this], and I think Perl would be a good language for you to write it in." I'd never heard of Perl, but I took the book home that evening, read it, and wrote the script the next day. About a year later I was maintaining the Perl FAQ. About two more years later, I was helping to write the second edition of the Camel. Eight years later, and every once in awhile a little check (now that Ed. 3 has been out for a couple of years, *very* little....) appears in my mailbox.

Tim O'Reilly is the genuine article

[yagu]

I accidentally met O'Reilly at a Linux conference in North Carolina a number of years back. We chatted it up about Linux, where we thought it might be going, what we thought Linux might say at the keynote address (turned out to be the year Linus said he would, "never, never, again write code to minimize memory to small memory machines...", a scary statement, but interestingly enough still to this day Linux is comparably resource thrifty), and small talk (not the language).

He was soft spoken and unassuming. Somewhere in the course of discussion we introduced ourselves to each other. I remember walking away thinking what a nice guy, and an interesting coincidental name with the publisher. Yeah, it was the Tim O'Reilly, and I didn't figure it out until I saw him speak later that day. Wow.

His presentation was low key, more about rallying the community than circling the wagons. Here was truly a man with a vision and understanding about the fabric of technology. Oh that the leaders of many more of our technology companies could be of his ilk.

(As an interesting aside (to me), this was also the same conference at which I met ESR, same way, just striking up a conversation after a presentation. When time began to run out I told him I had to move along, I wanted to get to the Eric Raymond presentation. He smiled and let me go, telling me he'd see me there. LOL)

No fanfare, just the real deal

[FishandChips]

It's very hard to make money out of publishing, so I guess the guy is a genius really. He's also got recognition. When I go into a shop I'll very likely buy the O'Reilly book out of the choices available because I know I'll get a solid number from a company worth supporting. So many other outfits are just faceless conglomerates owned by a monster toad somewhere. And with some topics, an O'Reilly book will be the only choice available anyway.

There is some competition, I guess. My local Borders has some nice titles from No Starch Press in among the O'Reilly ones. Too bad there isn't one title on Debian from anyone stocked, though. It would be good to see more No Starch books. They're a little more hip and sometime a row of O'Reilly can look a bit staid.

I once mail-ordered a book from O'Reilly and they sent me the wrong one. When I called them, they said they'd send out a replacement pdq (which they did) and told me I could keep the other, wrong one with their compliments. No need to inconvenience myself by returning it. It's a great book too. You have to respect a company like that.

Still have all my O'Reilly books. They are really well put together unlike most these days.

Re:No fanfare, just the real deal

[fireboy1919]

There is some competition, I guess.

Kinda...not really. The IT industry is full of bad books - REALLY bad books. There are so many new things coming out, and so people are trying to publish stuff as quickly as possible. With a few exceptions (such as, for instance document publishing languages and compiler tech), things change a lot.

O'Reilly publishing has been the only company that delivers any kind of consistency. That's a really big deal, because all of the computer books sell for around $50! $50 for something that has 1% useful information and 99% stuff the author picked up on some website somewhere isn't worth it at all.

When you first start learning a new technology, its really hard to tell which books are giving you fluff and which have good stuff that will actually help you. So you have to rely on someone else. Friends work out, but only to a point.

Inevitably there will be some areas that you know more about than any of your tech friends, (or you know nothing and neither do they), and you have to trust strangers. I pay for O'Reilly books because O'Reilly stands behind the quality of them, and I can usually trust that I'm going to get a lot out of them.

Oh, and for the tried and true commonly available areas - like perl 5, or html they've got some REALLY high quality gems.

Not as cool anymore, though.

[Halfbaked Plan]

O'Reilly didn't used to publish a lot of Windows-specific book titles. They were cooler back in the era when they mainly published books for the classic UNIX tools (i.e. SED/Awk, the multi-volume X Windows Reference series (which is a quite COMPLETE reference for X if you run it bareboned with good old TWM) and even some of the BSD manual volumes. Toward the end of the 90's geek-chic sort of damaged the whole scene. Now they publish comix.

They do produce some of the best Windows-oriented books, of course. Actually almost the only ones worth purchasing. Lower screenshot-count (a fairly accurate measure of a Windoze book's worth) than many of the alternate publishers.

Tired

[Doc Ruby]

O'Reilly does seem to be a right-on visionary with a productive work ethic. I'm impressed that he's got 15% of the computer book market, with his high quality products. And his interviews have presented an articulate guy who's passionate about the right things, with a sharp BS detector.

I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though. Ever since I first saw their prelaunch ads on SF buses in 1993-4, they've seemed like the _Omni_ mag of high-tech. Breathless marketing hype that's usually wrong about the implications of any tech trend they opportunistically hump like an Aibo on Marshall McLuhan's leg. I tried reading that insufferable windbag Nicholas Negroponte's book, _Being Digital_, compiled from his "prescient" _Wired_ endpaper columns. I had thought he guessed wrong whenever I read them in a crapper in the 1990s. In retrospect, they're not even good for toilet paper. And the rest of the magazine holds up just as poorly. Except for that terrific epic by Neal Stephenson about "the longest wire in the world". Even _Wired_ couldn't taint Stephenson, and apparently not O'Reilly, either.

O'Reilly's Travel Books

[coaxial]

Everyone knows the high quality of ORA's technical books, but what about their travel books? I only know of them through the old ORA printed catalogs of the mid 90s. I've always assumed that the travel books would be to an equally high standard, but I've never actually seen one. If anyone has, I'd love to hear about them.

Re:O'Reilly's Travel Books

[tadghin]

The travel books are not published by O'Reilly itself, but by another company I started called Travelers Tales. See http://www.travelerstales.com./

I like to think they are pretty good - they've won lots of awards and get the same kind of glowing praise from their readers as our technical books.

They aren't guidebooks per se, but rather collections of stories about places, to give you an idea of what the place is like before you go, or if you're just an armchair traveler.

Re:Why wired is great

[DrZaius]

I've had the pleasure of seeing him speak twice. The first time was around '99 at UBC at some sort of thing ActiveState was putting on. At that point it was just plain cool to see the guy who publishes all the excellent books I'd been buying.

The next time was at the MySQL conference last April. After he did a keynote, I went up and talked to him. He had a few William Gibson references in his presentation. I asked him about that and we chatted for a few minutes. We exchanged business cards and that was about it. I was hoping to get him to sign his book of essays which I had picked up earlier at the conference, but I forgot in the middle of the conversation..

As lame as it may seem, it was pretty cool to get to talk to one of my heros. He's quite the optimitic dreamer and does it without an invasive corporate vision.

It's hard to believe that oreilly only has 15% of the tech book market -- 80% of my library is oreilly.