Online Resources – Your safari bookshelf
The internet is a great resource for our programming needs, with hundreds of scripts and tutorials to achieve almost anything. For some time this has been more appealing that purchasing a dedicated technical book on a topic. It is almost a luxury to purchase a $100+ book.
Technical books typically are structure in a couple of different formats. Usually there are introductory books, teaching you every concept about a given topic without requiring any prior knowledge, a “learn by example” book and a “cookbook” style containing tasks common to many programmers.
On the internet we often find content similar to what is contained in the “learn by example” or “cookbook” style books. You can summon all the scripts in the world with a quick google on a topic.
One of the main concerns I have using the internet as your only resource is that we often have to sort through a lot of examples poorly written by anyone that knows how to publish a webpage. Books on the other hand are usually complete; a snippet of code is usually a result of prior discussions or examples, written by well respected industry professionals with the support of a publishing company.
I have been using an online resource for reading books online. It allows me to search over thousands of books and have a dream technical library of resources online. If there is a new programming topic or something I need to learn, I know that I will have a great selection to read at my pace online – and I can access it anywhere.
The online resource is called Safari Bookshelf and it has been around for many years now. I first learnt about the resource about 5 years ago and ever since then it has been growing adding all the books I need. It is run by O’reilly publishing and has all the good books. So does having thousands of books in your library mean that you need to pay thousands of dollars? No.
An Safari bookshelf subscription costs you around what you would pay to buy 1-2 technical books a year. By ensuring that you are have the resources from both online and from books you can be safe to say you will have all the correct resources you need if you need to learn about a topic. You can get a free month trial aswell.
Cam, with Safari Bookshelf is it perfectly ‘ok’ to reprint the book? If it were so, I imagine it would be advantageous for students who have to spend hundreds of dollars on text books and only get one years use out of them. I mean downloading a book to disk then getting it printed and bound at the local printer would only cost like $20 max.
Of course I’m not condoning this if it’s against the nature of the service though…
Comment by Richard Lee — March 20, 2006 @ 10:13 am
Yes it would be interesting to do the calculations.
An interesting note is that at my University access to Safari Bookshelf was free on campus, you didn’t need an account or anything. Safari recognised you were on campus by your network I.P. and automatically allowed you to view whichever book in entirity as you needed.
As most people have Wireless Laptops today around campus you probably wouldn’t even need to download, as it is all “on” your laptop.
Safari do although allow you to get chapters of the books as PDF, but it is really pushed and they have a coupon system to limit the amount you can take from each book.
Comment by Cameron Manderson — March 21, 2006 @ 8:47 am