Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf

No, I don’t get any money for posting this or referring anyone. Neither does my company. This is just to let you know my experiences with Safari in case you were thinking of subscribing.

Several of the books I’ve reviewed here lately I don’t actually own. My employer, CapTechVentures, gives every employee an account with the Safari Bookshelf by O’Reilly.

Now they certainly don’t expect us to read all of our books online, but view it more as being able to search a large number of technical books and be able to view the relevant material quickly (as opposed to Amazon, where you can search for something, but then you must buy the book). It is especially useful for all the technical work we do, and covers enough of both Java and .NET to be useful to everyone. Currently Safari has close to 2000 books.

So what publishers would you expect to find? Check out this diagram:

If you read a lot of books by these publishers, Safari could be a good investment for you.

What are the limitations? To view the full text of a given section of a book, it needs to be on your “bookshelf.” There are several bookshelf sizes. I use small, and that limits me to 5 concurrent books at a time. Once a book is on your bookshelf, it has to stay there for 30 days. Most books take up one slot, but some take a half-slot (0.5 slots) and some can take more than one, though I haven’t seen any books like that yet. You can upgrade your bookshelf size at any time, which costs more money of course.

That’s about it. I enjoy it as an employment perk. Would I buy it on my own? I’m not sure, since I can usually get my employer to foot the bill on any technical books I want to purchase. If that were to change, I probably would subscribe.

Published Dec 13 2003, 03:06 PM by darrell

Filed under: Book Reviews

Comments

Jim Martin said:

what about books24x7? Have you tried them? I have an account on books24x7 and I really like it for the content it provides. What I don't like about it is the fact that in most cases it is really hard to print a complete chapter. I like to read from a book a lot better than reading from the screen. The screen just starts to hurt the eyes after a while.

# December 14, 2003 11:18 AM

Darrell said:

Never looked at books24x7. I guess I will have to check it out!

I definitely agree with you on the screen reading, although I have noticed an improvement with the latest LCDs if they are cranked up to their highest resolution.

# December 15, 2003 12:23 AM

Paul Laudeman said:

Jim,

Books24x7 is very similar to the O'Reilly Safari bookshelf, and suffers from many of the same problems you pointed out (I used to use Books24x7 a couple of years ago, so things may have changed since).

The compelling feature of the Safari bookshelf by far is the breadth of titles you can choose from and the fact that almost all the titles are current books that you want to read. You can print the page you are viewing easily enough, however, you can't easily print an entire chapter for offline reading and doing so would violate their terms of service.

If you don't have an employer that will reimburse you for the books you buy, then either of these services are a good alternative, so long as you keep in mind that the true value of these services is in the reference and search capabilities, not necessarily in reading a book from start to finish.

# December 15, 2003 6:56 AM