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OReilly used to be the best, what happened? Over the last few years the OReilly books I bought haven't been that good. I've bought a bunch of Manning books rece

by rr808 5y ago

OReilly used to be the best, what happened? Over the last few years the OReilly books I bought haven't been that good. I've bought a bunch of Manning books recently which are quite good. Is everyone learning via MOOCs/Tutorials/Online docs/Youtube now?

dragonquest 5y ago
I think Manning/NoStarch/Pragmatic generally have good quality books, but O'Reilly is not too far behind. They just publish a lot many books, so some are bound to be mediocre and some of them absolute gems.
acomjean 5y ago
They used to be my go to. I have Unix Power Tools/ mastering regular expressions still looking down on me. But they really really pushed the safari subscription and stopped selling dam free e-books. Safari is probably great, but when I tried it I found it clunky and kinda a pain. Being able to search through your books is great. I had bought probably like 20 ebooks from them when they were still selling them. I imagine that tech books don't sell in huge volumes. So the pay isn't great so its probably hard to get people to write them, as its more of a labor of love than a profit making endeavor. With online resources they're probably selling fewer books as well. Manning is quite decent I'll agree.
- elcapitan 5y ago
  > So the pay isn't great so its probably hard to get people to write them, as its more of a labor of love than a profit making endeavor. Plus it can be a career cornerstone especially for authors who do consulting, to have written an O'Reilly book on their topic, I would imagine.
elcapitan 5y ago
It seems they have increased their output, and you have to sieve through more carefully. In many fields the overlap between the many books from the same publisher about the same topic can be pretty annoying, and this is now the case with O'Reilly as well, apparently. Just tried to find some good books in the data science/R/scipy space, and they have massively increased their portfolio there. Also, the prices seem to be much higher (inflation?). Something that always bugged me and still is the case is that O'Reilly publishes many books with a general title, which then turn out to be basically tutorials for one specific library/language/ecosystem (especially if the technology in question is less popular, otherwise they would use it for advertising on the cover).

by rr808 5y ago

dragonquest 5y ago

I think Manning/NoStarch/Pragmatic generally have good quality books, but O'Reilly is not too far behind. They just publish a lot many books, so some are bound to be mediocre and some of them absolute gems.

acomjean 5y ago

They used to be my go to. I have Unix Power Tools/ mastering regular expressions still looking down on me. But they really really pushed the safari subscription and stopped selling dam free e-books. Safari is probably great, but when I tried it I found it clunky and kinda a pain. Being able to search through your books is great. I had bought probably like 20 ebooks from them when they were still selling them. I imagine that tech books don't sell in huge volumes. So the pay isn't great so its probably hard to get people to write them, as its more of a labor of love than a profit making endeavor. With online resources they're probably selling fewer books as well. Manning is quite decent I'll agree.

elcapitan 5y ago
> So the pay isn't great so its probably hard to get people to write them, as its more of a labor of love than a profit making endeavor. Plus it can be a career cornerstone especially for authors who do consulting, to have written an O'Reilly book on their topic, I would imagine.

elcapitan 5y ago

It seems they have increased their output, and you have to sieve through more carefully. In many fields the overlap between the many books from the same publisher about the same topic can be pretty annoying, and this is now the case with O'Reilly as well, apparently. Just tried to find some good books in the data science/R/scipy space, and they have massively increased their portfolio there. Also, the prices seem to be much higher (inflation?). Something that always bugged me and still is the case is that O'Reilly publishes many books with a general title, which then turn out to be basically tutorials for one specific library/language/ecosystem (especially if the technology in question is less popular, otherwise they would use it for advertising on the cover).