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Programming IT Technology

25 Years of O'Reilly Books 146

Posted by chrisd from the from-x-to-perl-to-nursing dept.
wka writes "The year 2003 marks the 25th anniversary of publisher O'Reilly and Associates. O'Reilly has a site to mark the event. Readers can learn about the origin of the first animal covers in the time line, and read an anniversary message from Tim O'Reilly, stating his 'audacious' goal '[t]o change the world by capturing and transmitting the knowledge of innovators.'"
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25 Years of O'Reilly Books More

25 Years of O'Reilly Books

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  • And thanks for all the high-quality books you provided throughout these 25 years and hopefully will continue to provide for a long time to come! :) They helped me solving a lot of problems! CHEERS! :-)

  • Action Sequence Covers? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rudy079 ( 464049 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:33PM (#5022067) Homepage
    I think O'Reilly should make books comparing two different langauges, editors, computer topics. Why you ask? So they can show these crazy animals fighting it out on the cover. Wouldnt you love to see the Jave in a nut Shell Tiger beat up/eat the Dynamic HTML Flamingo? I thought so.
  • Can't say I have any other book on my shelf. Fourteen in all (I just switched from Apache/mod_perl to Java/J2EE).

    Each time I go get a new book, I check everything on the shelf. I *always* end up with a O'Reilly.

    • You're missing out on some great books then. Not that O'Reilly books are bad, but outside of the Perl arena their books are hardly definitive.
      • 'Linux Device Drivers', 'DNS and BIND', 'the Linux Kernel' and the Apache reference are close enough to definitive for me. even better 'Linux Device Drivers (and others) are published under the GDL (documentation).

      • Re:Nuthin' but O'Reilly (Score:4, Interesting)

        by neuroticia ( 557805 ) <neuroticia&yahoo,com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @08:11PM (#5022530) Journal
        Last I checked NOTHING was "definitive", even the big thousand-plus-page books that you could break your back carrying. There's always more information than a book can possibly hold, and more ways to present it than you can shake a stick at. (And we know how Slashdotters love to shake sticks.)

        OReilly books aren't definitive, but they do a damned good job of covering the bases and then some--and most importantly, they're written in a concise lucid manner that's hard to come by in tech books where too many people's brains are fried from long hours and one too many tubs of Penguin mints.

        I have a number of non OReilly books sitting on my bookshelf, they probably outnumber the OReilly books--and they're great. No complaints. But the books that are on my desk day in and day out are the ones with funny little animals on the covers, and nearly everything I need to know between the covers.

        Generally, what an OReilly book doesn't cover, I can find out with a few minutes of research on the internet, and all those other great books I have? Unfortunately they collect dust most of the time.

        (The only non-OReilly book currently on my desk is the ever-present PHP Developer's Dictionary--SAMS)

        -Sara
        • I agree with you. O'Reilly books are very good but i still go to the library and skim a few other books on the topic. Also once you know a topic the O'Reilly book on the subject is probably the best thing to use as a reference.
        • But the books that are on my desk day in and day out are the ones with funny little animals on the covers, and nearly everything I need to know between the covers.
          You obviously have an advance copy of O'Reilly's Sex in a Nutshell (the one with rabbits on the front).
          • *laughs* I'm a girl. I don't NEED to know anything between the covers. :p

            Besides, if a girl were to go to bed with a Slashdot goon, all she'd have to do is whisper Linux commands, and he'd be in heaven. :p That is something one CAN learn from OReilly books.

            -Sara
      • Personal preference I guess.

        I always read through the books on the shelf in the category that I'm looking for...I stand there for hours until my feet hurt :)

        It was hard to not get a few of the Sun Java books.

        The Rox Press books are good too.

        But, there is just something about the O'Reilly books that my brain can digest.
    • Can't say I have any other book on my shelf. Fourteen in all

      Pah! Amateur :-) Having just counted up, I have 51 of thier books. In all of those, there's only one that I feel really doesn't match the quality of the rest, and that's Power Programming with RPC [oreilly.com]. To this day, I still can't work out why they published it, when it's so obviosuly not up to scratch. But among the rest, there are some real gems, covering most of my favourite geeky subjects. And of course, the X11 books are indispensable...

      • Amateur. 175 books, 6 in the past couple of weeks not including the XML CD Bookshelf.

        I gave HTML books to my daughter who's a sysadmin in Boston.

        See here [geocities.com] for my list and here [geocities.com] for my outdated alphabetical list of O'Reilly animals.

        One of these days, I'll have to update it.

        [John]
    • And you are proud of this?

      Go out and read a REAL book before your mind falls into itself

    • I have a lot of O'Reilly but I have been less than happy with a couple of their books. In general, they are a safe bet whilst other publishers can be variable to say the least.

      The problem is that you can't always tell by a quick leaf through in the store. It isn't until you try and do something that you start to find out what was missing. However, the editors at O'Reilly aren't bad, and it is a good bet to grab one.

      However, you can miss a lot of other good books if you only buy O'Reilly.

  • Perl books (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ademko ( 32584 )
    I think the Perl books were they're most crowning acheivements. All other Perl books were secondary to the O'Riely versions. I guess owning Mr. Wall didn't hurt in that respect :)

  • Amazing Job, O'Reilly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ninja Master Gara ( 602359 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:36PM (#5022080) Homepage
    O'Reilly books were just IT when it comes to learning new stuff. DNS and Bind and Linux in a Nutshell sold me on those "weird books with animals on the cover".

    We even ran O'Reilly WebSite for a number of years with no complaints. Take that Microsoft! No IIS for us!

    Congrats and Well Done to an icon of the industry.

    *votes to change RTFM to RTFO'Reilly Book*

  • The Perl book is the most memorable... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dagg ( 153577 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:36PM (#5022087) Journal
    The book is considered definitive, and yet, the authors still answered the "little people"s questions. The first time that Randal Schwartz answered one of my perl questions in a newsgroup, I about fell outta my chair.

  • The sun has set on O'Reilly (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:37PM (#5022092) Homepage Journal
    For a while O'Reilly was the premier book publisher for computer related topics. However if there latest offerings (going back at least 2 years) have been any indication, they have had mucho trouble attracting top writing talent.

    Publishers like Manning, Wrox, and Microsoft Press have been able to offer books that blow away the competing O'Reilly books and at a fraction of the cost.

    Also, it is important to note how fragile O'Reilly books are. The construction techniques leave much to be desired as pages frequently just fall out of the binding. This is a small minus, however, compared to the lack of quality content on those pages.

    This is not to say that there aren't any good O'Reilly books, though. Most of their stuff published before 1999 was pretty good and their Perl coverage is second to none. However most other topics are pretty shabbily approached and the situation doesn't seem to be getting any better.
    • Sad, but true that O'Reilly quality seems to be on the way down. I loved the O'Reilly books when I did a couple years as a sysadmin. DNS & Bind, Programming Perl, Sendmail, the 4.4 BSD reference series, etc. All earned classic status - I had work copies, home copies, and always recomended them to anyone who asked.

      The newest stuff: ssh, RADIUS, 802.11, openssl, etc. have all been somewhat disapointing. Maybe this is because my professional needs have changed, but it really seems like the books are just not written at the same level.

      Maybe competing against Learn crap in a 10 seconds with no reading required!!! is taking its toll.

    • Re:The sun has set on O'Reilly (Score:4, Informative)

      by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:51PM (#5022173) Homepage Journal
      This is not to say that there aren't any good O'Reilly books, though. Most of their stuff published before 1999 was pretty good and their Perl coverage is second to none. However most other topics are pretty shabbily approached and the situation doesn't seem to be getting any better.

      Actually, I have found their willingness to extend into new areas rather interesting. Take for instance their exploration into bioinformatics. I wrote a review for one their bioinformatics texts here [applelust.com] and found it to be rather useful. How many intro to bioinformatics textbooks are there? I'll answer that. Not many, and their text was a good start and quite useful for many universities interested in starting a program in bioinformatics.

    • Re:The sun has set on O'Reilly (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:51PM (#5022175) Journal
      >>Publishers like Manning, Wrox, and Microsoft Press have been able to offer books that blow away the competing O'Reilly books and at a fraction of the cost.

      I agree that ORA books have been getting a wee bit more expensive lately. But I don't really think the quality of their content is slipping.

      ADW has been putting out quality books for years. In some cases the books are better than ORA's. Though they're a bit dryer in content and style.

      WROX and MS Press? I guess that we all have our tastes. If they work for you, then go for it. Personally, I have a hard time reading both. The typesetting is hard to read. And the books themselves...just look cheap. ORA's are easy to read and have a touch of class to them.

      In the case of WROX, my past experience with them has been that their books are full of tecnical errors. More than the average textbook. If someone can confirm that their quality has improved, I'll start looking at their books again.

      • Re:The sun has set on O'Reilly (Score:5, Insightful)

        by packeteer ( 566398 ) <packeteer@@@subdimension...com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @07:37PM (#5022391)
        The books tend to be prohibitably expensive to some. As a high school student who doesn't have enough money to lay down $50 a book it can be a hassel but thats what the library is for. I have talked to people who use books such as these to make money and they all say that the price is not an issue in a good book becuase they will help you gain far more. Personally i plan on making some money off what i have learned and then going and buying at least 10 of their books. One of the easiest ways to fix a problem on a computer is to find the book/chapter that covers your problem and read the whole thing. The "extra" knowledge that you get from these books makes it far more useful than another book where you simply learn which buttons to click in a GUI.

        Even though i prefer O'Reilly books i still read others. After i read the O'Reilly book i like to go to the library and grab a couple of competing books. Even if the quality isn't any better knowledge absorbs better when you read the same thing said in two different ways for me.

        • Re:The sun has set on O'Reilly (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          bookpool.com dude, cheapest prices out there and if you order more than one or two books at a time the shipping is less that sales tax would have been... of the 30 or 40 ora books sitting on my shelves, probably 75% of them came from bookpool.

          • Re:The sun has set on O'Reilly (Score:4, Interesting)

            by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @09:16PM (#5022828) Homepage
            I can confirm this. I found bookpool.com and they have by far the cheapest prices on technical books, they were really consistently at least a couple bucks cheaper than Amazon.com's prices (which are usually pretty similar to on-the-shelf prices) and I'm sure their shipping charges change, but I got some books from them recently where it was (I think) free shipping if you ordered over $50.

            Also, in some cases the differences in their prices and bookstores off-the-shelf prices were really dramatic, like one of the books I ordered from them, The Art of Electronics, is ~$70 in any bookstore and about the same on Amazon, but they sold it for only $50. That is an awesome discount.
        • Join Safari.Oreilly.com; for as little as $10 a month you can have 5 "book points" (each book in your "bookshelf" is worth 1 points, some big ones are 2 pts.) I've had it for about 6 months now, and have read a LOT of books I otherwise wouldn't have bought. Plus, with a bit of effort (and some diminishment in quality (i.e. page #s, no index) you can cut-and-paste all of the HTML in your word processor and then go print it on your company and/or school's printers. (Tip: Print 2-pages per side, double sided, the books take up 1/4 of the space)
        • Buy used books from Amazon, I just got Learning Python and Programming Python for $26 + shipping.

    • Re:The sun has set on O'Reilly (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's my belief that O'Reilly books have suffered in quality because the authors submitting books are doing a crappier job.

      Authors are seeing the "Learn MFC and Linux together in 15 seconds" books which are basically reprints of FAQ's, and existing manuals to jack up the size of the book to 800 pages and saying "I could do that, man"... and they DO.

      Garbage in, Garbage out. If the authors all write crap books, O'Reilly will put out crap books.

      I will add that I have a lot of GOOD O'Reilly books (Sendmail, Perl stuff, Java stuff, even the Curses book, and a set of X11 from when X11R4 was new). I don't want a book on "How to turn on your new Mac".

    • At work, WROX books usually sit on the desks of people that are the most clueless. Their size is often ridiculous. Like trying to say: see, it's a really big book, I know a lot. Finally, I find their covers really really bad. I understand how flattering it must be for the authors, but it's of the worst taste. It's not Oprah magazine, people. It's a tech book!

      Wanna try some cool books: try out New Riders [newriders.com]. I own 2 of their 'Essential Reference' titles and they're both excellents. The Jakob Nielsen book is also a classic. Give them a shot.

    • Yes, the bindings are bit fragile, but. . . (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:41PM (#5023399)
      it is at least for a reason. They *open flat.*

      Not only are the "eight hundred pound gorilla" books generally inferior to the O'Reilly offerings, but you have to break their "studier" bindings to make them actually usable at the keyboard.

      I bless O'Reilly every day for this little, and for them more expensive to produce, nicety, even if the odd page does fall out of some of the older and more well thumbed volumes.

      KFG

  • old book burning ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by HealYourChurchWebSit ( 615198 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:39PM (#5022098) Homepage


    I'm curious how many of us have an old UUCP or perhaps the first edition of Lexx/Yacc or some other now obsolete O'Reilly book ... more often than not sitting next to an up-to-date version of the same? Perhaps we could solve the U.S. energy worries by collectively burning them?

    I also wonder how many of us proudly display an entire bookshelf full of them at work ... you know, the more titles, the higher geek esteem we're held at the office?

    Either way, here is a fun little parody to roll your own O'Reilly cover [ilbbs.com]. Another fun one at O'Really [bofhcam.org]. And a few images [reznor.com] just for fun.

    • BURN them?!?! Not today. All too often I need to deal with an old computer. Those old books often have some critical information that I need to make the old comptuers work that isn't in the new book. Generally because the feature I need is obsolete and has been replaced by a better way on new impliemtations, but not the old. Upgrade sounds good, but not when you are in a lab testing compatability with those old systems.

      I also like to keep those old books around for historical perspective. By paying attention to my origonal C book I was reminded that not all comptuers are 32 bits (back in the days when 16 bit was no longer worth my while to support, and 64 bits was not in). I never knew when my program might have to run on that 36 bit machine referenced. (Never mind that it was obsolete about the time I was born, it once existed and that was enough to remind me to keep my programs portable)

    • Guilty as charged, I have both, and the COFF book......

  • Awesome Job (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:41PM (#5022108) Journal
    The only thing I can really contribute to this discussion is this:

    O'Reilly has some of the best books available on the topics covered. They have helped me enhance my skills more than any other source of information. When I need to learn something tech related, I always check ORA first to see if there's a book available.

    My bookshelves at work and home are predominantly blue, pink, and green. :)

    I can't thank them here properly, words don't really do the job. So I plan on continuing to buy their books. That's my thank you.

    • My bookshelves at work and home are predominantly blue, pink, and green

      The pink always bothered me. Geeks have enough trouble getting social exceptance. Pink does not help this.
    • For me, I depend on Amazon.com and my two local friendly superchains of bookstores for my selection.

      I usually sort all my results from Amazon by costumer reviews. I look at all the books that have five-star ratings. I read all the reader reviews given on those books. I roughly guess which books have legitimate reviews, and then I usually run down to the bookstore with my shortlist of top candidates to make my final selection.

      Doing it this way, I found that an O'Reilly book is not consistently the best book out there. It may be pretty good (as in Programming C#), it may be the best of its kind (as in Learning Perl), but it can also be pretty awful (such as in Ruby in a Nutshell [not to slam Matz/Ruby because I actually love Ruby and without Matz there wouldn't be a Ruby anyhow]).

  • Dover Math Books (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WindowsTroll ( 243509 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:45PM (#5022125) Homepage
    I've always liked the O'Reilly books - good content at a decent price and very distinctive covers. Reminds me of all those math books from Dover Publications (http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-mat hematics.html) - excellent math books at rock bottom prices and very distinctive covers.
    • I don't know about excellent when it comes to Dover. A great deal of what Dover publishes is really old and not necc. the best the selection even from the old stuff. Some of it is quite good, none of it near the best on the topic and some of it truly horrible. At $8 / book I'm not complaining but lets not push it too much.

    • Hear, hear!

      God bless Dover. They also publish positively oodles of other great stuff for next to nothing.

  • I have read O'Reilly Books for as long as I can remember at least 10 yrs. They are without question the best books on computer related technology, no one else comes close.

  • Safari (Score:5, Interesting)

    by orin ( 113079 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:51PM (#5022176)
    Without trying to sound like an advertisment, I've found O'Reilly's Safari service is ebooks over the web done RIGHT. They get your contribution which funds the library, you get cheap access to books that would otherwise cost you a lot more money legitimately. The only downside is that you don't get the geek-cred of having all of those animal books on your shelf at work.

    Has anyone seen any other publishers offering a similar service that is as good value wise? I wasn't particularly impressed by the offering from Wrox but I'm guessing that someone else out there will follow O'Reilly's lead.
    • Baen Books does something similar, but for Fiction.

      http://www.webscriptions.net

    • Your downside may not last (which is good!). I wrote to them with a suggestion for applying a discount to the purchase of books you commonly use and they wrote back with the following:

      Hello,

      Safari Tech Books Online and the participating publishers are looking into such a feature and
      related features. Though nothing has been settled at this time.

      Thanks for the interest,

      Safari Support

  • Timeline (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:52PM (#5022188) Homepage
    The O'Reilly timeline could have been really good with more listings on it. Top 1 or 2 books per year would have said a lot and demonstrated how the technologies bled into one another.

    Anyway I like just about /.ers buy a lot of O'Reilly books and I also have mixed reviews. However my biggest problem with them is that they don't so enough updating between versions and as a result there books are often dated. Also they often contain too little information, probably because of the small side. On the plus side they don't give the same basic facts again and again and they don't have information that will be dated 3 months after the book is published as most of the larger books do.

  • Great company (Score:4, Interesting)

    by div_2n ( 525075 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @06:53PM (#5022191)
    I think O'Reilly is great. Recently, I needed a book overnight for a Saturday delivery. I called every major bookstore in a 200 mile radius to see if they could get it for me by Saturday. No one could. O'Reilly got it to me.

    Hats off to them.

  • True in a Nutshell (Score:5, Funny)

    by dboyles ( 65512 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @07:09PM (#5022267) Homepage
    No doubt about it, you are most definitely a geek if you find this funny:

    True in a Nutshell [miketaylor.org.uk]

  • o'reilly as marketing machine (Score:5, Informative)

    by macsox ( 236590 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @07:10PM (#5022275) Journal
    the story of o'reilly is one that could really be taken to heart by a lot of linux geeks.

    they had and have a great product, but the first thing to come to mind is the animal cover. consistency and simplicity, combined with a superior product, make remembering that excellence simpler, and expand the brand and usage / sales.

    the moral? KISS, of course, but also, keep it consistent.
  • "Readers can learn about the origin of the first animal covers in the time line, and read an anniversary message from Tim O'Reilly"

    Readers can also try to connect the dots to reveal a business strategy and help Tux the penguin find the fish at the end of the maze.

    graspee

  • goals (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    change the world by capturing and transmitting the knowledge of innovators.

    Yeah, well my goal was to have sex with Britney Spears. It's nice to know i'm not the only failure.

  • O'Really? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I like O'REILLY books but I'm not really sure they can keep up with their biggest competitor, O'REALLY [www.inet.ca]

    :)


  • I enjoyed their acount of the habits of the slender loris pictured on the cover of Sed and Awk. Yessir.
  • And after using them to begin two languages, it's now the first thing I look for. Consistently good series. Congrats, guys.

  • Thank You, O'Reilly! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jayspec462 ( 609781 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @08:22PM (#5022574) Homepage
    I've been a unix system administrator for about 10 years now. In fact, I've never had another professional job outside of system administration. And I owe *all* of it to O'Reilly. Their books launched my career, and made me what I am today. I've paid full cover price for my entire library several times over (new editions, you know) but they deserve a larger chunk of my salary than that. Congratulations, and keep up the good work!
  • I wanted to say Happy Anniversery to Tim and O'Reilly books. I have really enjoyed the content and quality of the O'Reilly books I have purchased. The books I have so far:

    Learning The Vi Editor
    MP3, The Definitive Guide
    Learning The Bash Shell (Bash on NetBSD is great!)
    Practical C Programming
    HTML & XHTML
    TCP/IP Network Administration
    Securing Windows NT/2000 Servers for the Internet

    Now if he would just print a book on NetBSD! (Oops, I forgot; BSD is dying!)
  • barnes and noble STILL can't be arsed to put all the o'reilly books in one display. so i have to sit there for an hour trying to find the specific one i'm looking for amoung a million wanna-be's.

    oh well.
    • San Diego Technical Books [booksmatter.com] puts all the O'Reillys under one shelf. They have a great selection; I drove all the way from SoCal to buy an O'Reilly book and didn't regret it one bit.
    • That may be a store to store thing. The one barnes and noble by me has them all together now, they didn't before. Though the University owned one does not. They scamble them everywhere. But at least the Uni owned one has more titles. But yeah, when the arn't in one spot it's a pain. I'm one to just go for the O'reilly book on the topic i'm interested in and buy it without looking at others. I can read the book in the time saved.

  • Falling Quality Lately (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Skjellifetti ( 561341 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @08:54PM (#5022732) Journal
    I have 25 +/- O'Reilly books on my shelves. They are usually quite good, but I've had a few disapointments lately. Practical PostgreSQL does not cover embedded SQL in C/C++ and has a terrible index (only 6 pgs long). They chose to waste nearly 50 pgs of material on some unknown commercial add-on pkg that the authors had written. The penultimate book I bought - Java and XSLT - has a good discussion of the basics with examples, but is a terrible reference if you just want to see what the standard XPATH node set functions are (i.e. count() is available in an example, but what else might there be?). Instead they chose to include 40 pgs on java servlet basics that can already be found in 20 other books. For the XPATH stuff, I finally bought their XSLT book just to get the reference text I needed.

    I suspect that they are just overwhelmed by the volume of material that needs coverage these days and their editors don't know the material well enough to tell authors what should be included and what should be left out. I hope it isn't because they have fallen for the latest fad delivered at internet speed business model where it is more more important to ship code at all than to pause for a moment and check the code's quality.

    They are still up there (along with Prentice-Hall and Addison Wesley) as best of breed in programming books, but I think that I will be a little more careful about comparison shopping first instead of just automatically reaching for the O'Reilly version.

  • "Running Linux" (Score:5, Informative)

    by Simon Garlick ( 104721 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @09:15PM (#5022822)
    O'Reilly's "Running Linux" (Welsh and Kaufman, authors) is one of my "must-have" books. I have 3 copies -- one on my desk at work, one on my bookshelf at home, and one at my girlfriend's place. (Just in case!)
  • I learnt Java with Exploring Java and C with Practical C. I have so many ORA Java books now I don't know what to do with them. I found the ADW Java books to be very good as well but incredibly difficult and dry. O'Reilly books are usually human, and that is what often makes the difference.

    I quote from Exploring Java: An event can be a pressing a key on the keyboard, moveing the mouse or banging ones's head against the monitor.

    Isn't this the sort of thing that we all feel sometimes in this profession of ours?
  • why do you need books when youve got the man page and teh src?

    you need a $50 book to work mysql? LAME!

    i admin all my boxen without wasting $$$$. all i need is man and other linux gurus on irc
    • all i need is man and other linux gurus on irc

      Preferrably Linux gurus with $50 books near by.
  • They should start making books about animals but put engravings of computers on the front.

    Tim
  • What animal is on the cover of "Surviving the Slashdot Effect"?

  • I have green books, I have blue books, I have. . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @11:53PM (#5023445)
    pink books. I also have brown books, mint books an orange book and one book that doesn't really have any color at all.

    Yeah, I've got a couple red books and a handful of "bumble bee" books from the "other guys," but none of them are day to day usable like the O'Reillys. Even where I've found the odd book a bit superior for first contact with a particular subject it's the O'Reilly's that end up being my prefered reference down the road.

    But most of all no other computer tech books give me the pure *pleasure* of O'Reilly books. I love books. I've always loved books. When I was two and could first answer on my own the question, " What would you like for your birthday?" I said, "Books!"

    O'Reilly books aren't just manuals. They're honest to goodness, God almighty *Books.* No one else seems quite able to pull this off ( although New Riders is starting to get close).

    If I could only take one tech book to a desert island it would be an O'Reilly because they're the only books of the genre just plain worth *reading*.

    KFG
  • The one thing that bugs me more than anything is when they don't have a book on what I'm looking for. It makes me sad and loose intrest in it. I want them to have a Fortran book. Someone who knows fortran write them a book. There is lots up new Engineers and Scientist out there who would like to learn fortran since it's important in their feild. There is so many things written in fortran. Though I think any fortran book would need to cover all versions of fortran. I just find it amazing they don't have one. My C and C++ O'reilly books need a shelf mate.

    Also a Cobol book would be fun, found myself wanting to learn it for the hell of it, and a dinosour would be a must on the cover (maybe Bob the Dinosour, or Wally,(one looks like a COBOL programmer and the other is)). Same for Fortran I suppose.
    • That hits what I don't like about O'Reilly Book topics - they are to focused on the scripting/web business. There may be 20+ Perl books of ORA, but look at their dust C/C++/Fortran95 corner.
      I was so dissapointed about ORA, when I found out that they did not want to accompany me in these compiled languages, which are the foundations of any High Performance Computing and especially of many very important open source projects. Please write more about compiled languages that have performance for numerical number crunching and compile tools ... ... otherwise I really am a big fan of ORA. Congratulations!
    • Last year I was working on both Fortran and COBOL code. The COBOL was part of the main processing for the worlds largest electronic futures and options exchange (a major part), whilst the Fortran was for a database hacking tool used by the above. Yes, there is some new stuff written in C, but most of the regular processing (especially accounting type operatins) are written in COBOL).

      I'm still told by friends in the engineering/scientific community about the piles of existing Fortran code that is tsill in use.

      Neither language is dead, and whilst writing a GUI is somewhat painful, backend processing remains easy.

      Do we need a book on these languages? Well most of our younger COBOL coders started with modern languages and just adapted. The code they write isn't the best but it usually works. The main resource their is the COBOL language manual from the manufacturer, which is conveniently web accessible these days. My handiest document is an ancient pocket sized manual setting out the syntax skeleton for each part of the program. There are few COBOL variants around and outside the IO section, there is little that changes.

      I've had less recent exposure to people learning Fortran and there are definitely more Fortran standards around which would make it difficult to be cross platform.

      For annimals, Fortran would be a beaver or an ant, both natural engineers. I would agree that COBOL could be a dinosaur, - but as it still lives, shouldn't it be an animal like the crocodile? Unevolved, but quick and ruthlessly efficient.

  • I have an entire book case filled with my college text books (only those that corresponded to my major) and a few shelves of o'reilly books. i love my o'reilley books.

    my o'reilly books have been my introduction to vast amounts of technology and are my day to day reference. easily, i can buy one o'reilly book per month (which i usually do) and stay 5 steps ahead of my co-workers, 10 steps ahead of other fellow students, and 1 step ahead of my college professors.

    here is to another 25 years of o'reilly!

  • Sorry to dis' everyone's favorite publisher, but I fail to see how they can claim this is their 25th anniversary since their timeline admits their first publication was in 1986 which is only 17 years back. The twenty five figure marks Tim's introduction to unix, which is not quite the same thing as O'Reilly is it?
    • they where a company that wrote tech. manuals, then later published books. The company began 25 years ago. If you click on "O'rielly larns unix"(or somesuch) at the begining of the timeline, you'll see what I mean.
  • We would all be lost in the dark considering all the aspects of computing that exist now if it were not for the big O. Congrats!
  • Interesting that Microsoft doesn't rate a single mention in the timeline. Although O'Reilly has always been more in tune with the worlds of Unix and Open Source, this is still interesting. Does this reveal anything of their opinion of their own books on Microsoft software?
  • I have the pleasure to meet Mr O'Reilly in one of his speaking event [sdforum.org]. It was an insightful and throught provoking event. What set O'Reilly and other publisher apart is that they are truely interested in technology and even take a stance on issues (such as Amazon's 1-click patent). Many times I visit a book store I go straight to O'Reilly rack. Can't say every book has consistent highest quality. But at least they are thinner that other competitor's book and waste less paper on dumb topics. Keep on! We will continue to explore the world of technology together!

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