O’Reilly CD Bookshelves
Somebody (I’m afraid that I can’t remember who, and can’t seem to find the entry concerned) mentioned the O’Reilly Unix CD Bookshelf in the comments on an entry a little while ago. I couldn’t afford the full priced version, but I managed to find a used copy on Amazon. It was sold by Alibris, and only set me back £10 including postage from the Statesâbargain!
It arrived a couple of days ago, and I’m really impressed by how O’Reilly have implemented the CD bookshelf. You get 7 whole books in HTML format on a CD (I’ve copied the files to my hard drive for convenience), plus a book fashioned in genuine paper for good measure. In this collection, you get ‘Unix in a Nutshell, 3rd edition’ as your paper book, and all sorts of goodies in HTML format, including ‘Learning the vi Editor’, and ‘Mac OS X for Unix Geeks’âyay! The HTML versions are very well laid out, with lots of links to jump between chapters or books, and a very neat search page which will find stuff in any of the books. This is actually a huge advantage over paper books, as is the ability to copy and paste useful bits of code straight from the text. But you can’t read it in the bath, unless you are very, very careful (or you have more money than sense).
I have one slight niggle, though. In these days of on-demand publishing, I would have thought that it would be possible for customers to select which seven titles they would like in their CD Bookshelf from a small range of books on that topic. For example, in my CD Bookshelf, there’s a copy of ‘Learning the Korn Shell’, but I would have preferred Learning the bash Shell. Of course, for £10, I’m really being picky here, but if I had paid full price, a little more flexibility would be very welcome. Either way, I’ve got lots of lovely geeky reading in store over the holidays.
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O'reilly have a service called safari. There are hundreds of books there all online. YOu pay a monthly subscription and get access to up to 10 books at a time. You have to keep a given title for minimum of a month but can read it as much or as little as you like. Can't download as such, but there is nothing stopping you copying or printing page by page. It's not cheap, but if you re a heavy tech book user it can be quite valuable.----- i think i mentioned it, but i also wanted to give you the heads up on a new version of the Perl Bookshelf ( 4.0 ) coming out in january. i'm eagerly awaiting that one, although i don't think any pre-ordered it for me for xmas. =)
by brian @ 22/12/2003 2:13 pm • Permalink •
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It's not be very ecologically friendly but I really prefer to have the dead tree in front of me. And having a large shelf of O'Reilly books (in colour order) will add to anyone's geek street cred. I rarely pay full price for them though - there's a seconds bookshop in Cambridge which usually has various soiled O'Reilly books for about �5.
by RobH @ 22/12/2003 4:12 pm • Permalink •
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dave m: Yes, I know about Safari - in fact I was a subscriber to the lowest rung of the plan before funds got a bit tight. I found it to be extremely useful for books that you just need to consult quickly but don't need as a long term reference. Also, when I was learning Perl, it enabled me to start with the 'Learning Perl' book, and then move on to the 'Programming Perl' book. I do think that the actual text is more readable in the CD bookshelf versions, and it's better for long term reference.
brian: So it was, and you gave me a great tip
I did note the new version of the Perl CD bookshelf with great interest, but I'll probably wait until I can get hold of a used copy. I see that they include 'Mastering Regular Expressions', which is great.
RobH: I quite like the paper versions, too, but a severe lack of bookshelf space, and the bother of lugging them to and from work, has made me appreciate the electronic versions more.
by bsag @ 22/12/2003 7:13 pm • Permalink •
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Of course, I've got to mention that ksh is a very nice shell. It's too bad that it's not a default on Mac OS X, though. It's admittedly not as user-friendly as bash. I guess the preference depends on which you "grew up" with. If interested, you can get the Mac OS X version of ksh from http://www.research.att.com/sw/download/ -- it's the "darwin.ppc" link, near the top of the list.
by Nathan Ladd @ 24/12/2003 6:12 pm • Permalink •
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