Safari Books Online - O'reilly etc

[kingshuk]

Anybody used it? paid the subs etc?

Yes I subscribe to it. For approx $20 a month I get to keep 10 books in the 'bookshelf'. Most often for me that is good enough. You also get 5 'tokens' each month to download chapters (as pdf) from the books (1 token = 1 chapter) and I have ended up having soft copies of most of the books I like. You can pay extra to download more if you want to.

The russian site is good but has only O'reilly books (usually the old ones). Safari has added other publishers like Addison Wesley, Prentice Hall etc that I find useful.

Overall useful site. Here are the things I find annoying

a) you have to have the book on your bookshelf before you can read it.
b) With $20 you can not have more than 10 books at a time
c) Some books (usually the good/popular) are treated as 2 books for the bookshelf calculation. For example all the books by W Richard Stevens are equivalent of 2 books!
d)Once added you have to keep the book on the shelf certain number of days (forgot how many) before you can remove it.

[DBA_bloke]

I like Safari. Of course, it's not as easy on the eyes as a physical book. But I would advise going for it if a bit under-skilled in something: then it's a useful reference site. I cancelled my subsrciption, but only after getting loads from it, and then buying the books I liked.

[chicane]

Anybody used it? paid the subs etc?

It's pretty tough trying to read the books from the screen. Tend to lose concentration easily. Just my experience though.

[OwlHoot]

Anybody used it? paid the subs etc?

Get a subscription to Giganews, and start downloading from the usenet group alt.binaries.e-book.technical. I have over 100,000 books, including several hundred O'Reillys (not that I've ever got round to reading any).

I think AtW said he had over a terabyte of ebooks, although he may have been talking about his porn collection.

[Moscow Mule]

There's a Russian site that is very naughty and has the Oracle O'Reilly books there as well.

thats the one...

[TheFaQQer]

If you look carefully you might find a site where you don't have to pay a subscription.

EDIT: I found the site, it's not that hard to find with "oreilly online books" but it's just the unix related one...

There's a Russian site that is very naughty and has the Oracle O'Reilly books there as well.

[Moscow Mule]

If you look carefully you might find a site where you don't have to pay a subscription.

EDIT: I found the site, it's not that hard to find with "oreilly online books" but it's just the unix related one...

[NickFitz]

A friend who had a book published by O'Reilly got a free subscription for a couple of years and let me use it. I found it very useful when getting into something new, but since his sub ran out, I haven't actually paid for one myself. (I do however have about eight feet of bookshelves taken up with actual O'Reilly books, which grows every month or so.)

I believe there's quite a few other tech book publishers who now have their stuff on there. It's probably worth it if you're looking to get quite deeply into a subject for a while, but won't neccessarily be committing your whole life to it.

[Fishface]

Anybody used it? paid the subs etc?