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Buy 1 get 1 sale at O'Reilly. What are some good startup or tech-related books?
- Aaronontheweb 16y agoI highly recommend the pocket reference guides - those things are huge time-savers. I use the LINQ pocket guide constantly and the T-SQL pocket guide is another one I use quite often.
- jamesbritt 16y agoI'm reading JavaScript: The Good Parts. Pretty good. I also really like Make: Electronics. It's extremely well done, outstanding layout and graphics, excellent content, if you want to get started hacking hardware. BTW, apparently this sale is only for e-books, not paper.
- tkahn6 16y agoThere's also the Google Tech Talk from the author: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook
- dcotter 16y agoI'm a big fan of JavaScript: The Good Parts, but it doesn't appear on the list of books for sale.
- mjhoy 16y agoIt isn't on the list, but the discount code still worked for me. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/
- checker659 16y agoI don't know if I'll just come off as an ass but have you tried Safari Books (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/ http://my.safaribooksonline.com/) yet? Monthly subscription fee is about 25 bucks and it gives you unlimited access to most books from o'reilly and some from Apress as well. I think it's a much better alternative to the deal at hand.
- mishmash 16y agoMy only recommendation wrt Safari Books is that you use the download tokens in a timely manner. A while back I lost something like 20-30 of them because the subscription lapsed, and unless they've changed it, once you lose them, they're gone forever. And that sucks IMHO.
- dman 16y agoI agree about the download tokens. How they are handled is the only thing I dont like about the safari service. You get five per month and unused tokens last only for three months after which they disappear. So unless you keep track and download some book chapters every month you are likely losing tokens. That being said I think its a compliment to the service that this minor point is my only gripe against it.
- brown9-2 16y agoI believe different plans have different terms on the token amount/length - my corporate plan gives me something like 50 tokens to use in a year.
- heffay 16y agoGuys, there is a checkbox under "Email Preferences" that allows you to be alerted when your tokens are about to expire! Great feature
- checker659 16y agoMy school library's subscription gets me unlimited access to the service. I wasn't aware about the book expiration issue. Good to know about it because I'll be graduating soon and I plan to subscribe to the service on my own.
- lesterbuck 16y agoEven public libraries have Safari subscriptions, e.g. Harris County Public Library (Houston area). There are different versions of Safari, so some things are missing from this more public subscription, but there is a lot of stuff in there for free, after logging in with a library card.
- sandal 16y agoMy book, Ruby Best Practices is listed here, but you can download a free PDF copy instead: http://rubybestpractices.com http://rubybestpractices.com
- 3pt14159 16y agoSandal! Let me thank you ever so much for writing that amazing book! I learned so much about Ruby, and just coding in general. Even the appendices were great. Great balance of good examples and humor. Thanks!
- andy 16y agoMy favorite book is "How the Internet makes programming books mostly irrelevant"
- mishmash 16y agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted.. your statement, although not true for most theory pieces, does hold true for any kind of reference or API text.
- strlen 16y agoProgramming Scala by Alex Payne and Dean Wampler. It's a great companion to the Odersky/Venners book which is (in my view, which is far from unanimous) better as a reference or a follow-up rather than as a tutorial.
- okmjuhb 16y ago"Programming Collective Intelligence" is quite good. I like "The Ruby Programming Langauge" if it's something you're interested in. "Learning Python" is probably beneath you but it'd be a good gift for someone who wants to learn programming. I've heard good things about "Real World Haskell" but haven't read it.
- jamesbritt 16y agoAnyone interested in Haskell should get RWH. I forgot about it in my earlier comment, but it's well worth the $ (though there are free versions).
- rryyan 16y agoFrom the HN thread about the O'Reilly ebook sale a couple months ago, I found these suggestions helpful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368200
- sriramk 16y ago<plug> My book 'Programming Windows Azure' :) </plug>
- frio 16y agoI'm half-way through Real World Haskell. There's a free online version, but I find it easier to read off actual paper than my shitty screens. It's a really good book, and alongside, say, Learn Me a Haskell, is a good introduction to get you started with the language.
- shod 16y agoAnyone here read CouchDB: The Definitive Guide? I noticed it was written in January; how much has changed with the 1.0 release earlier this month? Still a worthwhile read?
- InclinedPlane 16y agoIt's all online for free: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/ http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
- mishmash 16y agoBought the PDF and was really happy with it as a reference. Used it to write YARCAL (yet another Ruby Couch adapter lib). Although that was for 0.10.x and I didn't follow Couch much after that - no idea what kind of changes have occurred since then.
- davidu 16y agoI haven't had a useful O'Reilly book since the Perl books came out about a decade ago.
- petercooper 16y agoFWIW, I just noticed my book "Beginning Ruby" is on a $10 one day deal at Apress: http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal (for the next few hours only..) See http://beginningruby.org/ http://beginningruby.org/ for more book specific info. Apress also note on Twitter that they've totally randomized how the daily deal works so you never know what book of theirs might turn up tomorrow. Seems a good deal if you keep looking for books you might want to buy cheap.
- cludwin 16y agoHigh Performance MySQL is pure gold!
- angusgr 16y agoI mean this in the nicest possible way, but: do you actually read tech books? and which kinds? Speaking for myself, I've found that I make nearly zero use of technical reference books. K&R is about the only counterexample that I can think of. In fact, for me, buying a book about some technology seems like it decreases the chances of me actually learning it. I read non-technology-specific non-reference books, but sadly a lot slower than I buy. Working in a second hand bookstore for most of my student years drilled home to me that for most people, self included, buying books is many times easier (and more frequent) than reading them.