Edit: To highlight an important part: It may be quicker to get references elsewhere and then check whether they are on Safari, than to try to find the best ch

Edit: To highlight an important part: It may be quicker to get references elsewhere and then check whether they are on Safari, than to try to find the best choices directly through the Safari interface. E.g. For one, off the top of my head, the reading list cited/linked by tptacek on his HN profile: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek -- At certain times, you can get the first year of unlimited-level Safari for $30/month instead of $43/month. I've only seen this for a month period around January or February, but some Googling might turn up an alternate means to get this deal. Safari has a subset of publisher Addison Wesley's books. Many of these are quite good. E.g. some on networking, some on "Effective X" (Ruby, Perl, etc.) More recent O'Reilly texts I have found to be hit and miss. Go back 5 or 10 years, and the overall level of quality seems to me to have been significantly higher. Safari also has some (but by no means all) books published by Manning, No Starch, MS Publishing (e.g. Code Complete (2), IIRC), etc. It may be quicker to get references elsewhere and then check whether they are on Safari, than to try to find the best choices directly through the Safari interface. Safari will carry multiple editions. Make sure you're looking at the latest. After a couple of years of Safari, I personally feel I would have been better off just purchasing eBooks (e.g. O'Reilly eBooks are DRM free and often available at discount through promotions) that I would continue to have access to indefinitely and without a network connection.