Safari, my saviour

I've been meaning to take a couple of minutes to sing the praises of Safari, by which I mean not a browser but O'Reilly's online library. Like most IT professionals, I've got a bunch of dead-tree O'Reilly books laying about, but having complete, searchable access to everything O'Reilly publishes, plus plentiful content from most other major IT publishers, is an absolute life-saver. Not only is it much cheaper and easier than buying old-fashioned books, it's infinitely more portable -- I no longer find myself packing a few extra kilograms of books into my carry-on. When I do need hardcopies or a way to work offline, I can generate PDFs -- I receive five "download tokens" per month, each of which is typically good for one chapter in PDF. Additional tokens can be purchased, and O'Reilly recently added "whole book downloads" which are great for those titles you just can't do without. And you can always buy the print version if you choose, of course, often at a nice discount.

 

New titles and even new publishers appear frequently. I subscribe to the RSS feed for such things and I often receive two or three items per day. 

 

Online viewing is very comfortable. A "print fidelity" view provides a PDF-like appearance, while a straight HTML view is lighter. Be warned that not all titles are available in both views, though. Zooming and pagination are good, and a retractable left-hand pane gives section-by-section navigation.

 

Content is not limited to books. There are e-learning videos, whitepapers, and how-to's (O'Reilly "Guides") too. A huge bonus is "rough cuts": late drafts of books not yet published. For those who live on the bleeding edge, rough cuts are invaluable. O'Reilly even lets readers provide pre-publication feedback.

 

There is room for improvement, of course. I have an unlimited subscription, so I can put as many titles on my "bookshelf" (my favourites list) as I want. The only downside to that is that my bookshelf quickly became hard to manage. A better bookshelf interface with more sort and custom metadata support would be welcome. Also, the web interface itself needs a bit of an overhaul -- too many clicks and page loads are required for simple tasks that could be handled with a bit of AJAX.

 

All in all, though, Safari represents an outstanding value and I'd recommend it to anyone who works with IT.