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safari bookshelf review
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Safari Books Online is an attempt to provide tech-oriented books electronically. Rather than having customers download encrypted data, the books remain at the server, and the user views them through an ordinary web browser.
Publishers represented include O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, Prentice Hall
and others. The material they have is certainly worth having access to.
I took advantage of my account to read "Pair Programming Explained" by
Laurie Williams and Robert Kessler. The book is good, but geek that I
am, I still don't like reading books by sitting upright at a desk. On
the other hand, it was available wherever I might be---at home,
at work during breaks, anywhere I could get a network connection on my
laptop. I'd be most likely to spot-check books to ensure I want a
paper copy, but might read some books that do not quite rate buying.
More useful, in my mind, is the ability to access my standard
reference library wherever I go. O'Reilly already realized the
importance of carrying your reference library with you, especially if
you are a contractor rather than an employee. However, $190 Cdn is a
stiff price for 7 books on cd. Safari charges by the size of your
bookshelf. Room for five books costs you $10 US a month, larger
bookshelves are available at higher rates. The cost is similar to the
O'Reilly CD, but you get to choose each book on the shelf, and always
get up-to-date versions.. Once you place a book on your bookshelf, it
has to stay there a month before you can replace it.
In the contract work I'm doing, I needed to look up some details about
Korn Shell programming. "Learning the Korn Shell" provided the
information I need. Programming Perl & Perl Cookbook would hold
perpetual places on my bookshelf, leaving room for books for which I
have only a transient need.
If you don't place a book on your bookshelf, you can still obtain some
access to the contents, but it only shows you a small amount of a
chapter or sub-chapter before urging you to move the book to your
bookshelf for full access.
As well, it is possible to search all the books, as well as to search
only the code fragments in the library, to locate relevant
quotes. General access helps to narrow down the books worth examining
more deeply, but to locate the information you need, you will usually
have to place the book on your bookshelf, committing yourself to using
it for a month.
Searching a large library is certainly beneficial. On the other hand,
the available material displays a MicroSoft/Java/Cisco bias which does
not correspond to my needs. The interface, hopefully, will improve over
time.
The key question is whether Safari will provide the materials you need to access, at a suitable price. The information is available wherever you go, no fear of leaving things behind. Depending on how many titles you need permanently on your bookshelf, how many additional topics you cycle through per month, Safari might be reference library you need. Do you always have the books you need in the right place? How often do you go out and buy an expensive book you don't use again, or one you already own?
--
Tom
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