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I'm pretty unhappy with O'Reilly's trend towards tiny books as well. I realize that 80 page books are easier to iterate rapidly on and get out the door while t

by tomku 14y ago

I'm pretty unhappy with O'Reilly's trend towards tiny books as well. I realize that 80 page books are easier to iterate rapidly on and get out the door while they're still relevant, but they're so short that they feel like glorified (and expensive) blog posts. I read tech books instead of blog posts because I appreciate the overall structure and "big picture" views that they give, not because I have some kind of fetish for paying for information. I've also found Manning to be a pretty good publisher. In particular, I really appreciate that their books tend to avoid "language reference syndrome", where half of the book walks you through the language syntax and the other half exhaustively details every function in the standard library. Books like that tend to be out-of-date as soon as they come off the (possibly virtual) printing press, and they just aren't as necessary as they were when online documentation didn't exist.

JPKab 14y ago
Yeah, I used to love their books, and tended to feel pretty confident that if a book had O'Reilly on the cover, it would be decent. Then I went and bought an O'Reilly title recently which appeared to have not been edited, at all. The code didn't work as written, and I quickly realized that I'd be better off reading source code on Github. The comments were better than that piece of garbage book.
- smacktoward 14y ago
  This is not a new thing. I used to have the same feeling, that the O'Reilly brand was a mark of quality. That ended when I bought their "Creating Applications with Mozilla" book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000523.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000523.do), which was riddled with misprints and errors, to the point that even the "Hello World" example code at the start of the book didn't work. It was disgracefully bad. I was actually, literally shocked by how bad it was. That was 11 years ago. And I haven't run into a whole lot of "buy the O'Reilly book" recommendations since.

by tomku 14y ago

JPKab 14y ago

Yeah, I used to love their books, and tended to feel pretty confident that if a book had O'Reilly on the cover, it would be decent. Then I went and bought an O'Reilly title recently which appeared to have not been edited, at all. The code didn't work as written, and I quickly realized that I'd be better off reading source code on Github. The comments were better than that piece of garbage book.

smacktoward 14y ago
This is not a new thing. I used to have the same feeling, that the O'Reilly brand was a mark of quality. That ended when I bought their "Creating Applications with Mozilla" book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000523.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596000523.do), which was riddled with misprints and errors, to the point that even the "Hello World" example code at the start of the book didn't work. It was disgracefully bad. I was actually, literally shocked by how bad it was. That was 11 years ago. And I haven't run into a whole lot of "buy the O'Reilly book" recommendations since.