In a small company like ours, where everyone wears several hats, The O’Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf has become an indispensable resource for the person wearing the hat with the propeller.
Safari is a big electronic reference library of information technology related books from O’Reilly and other technical publishers well-known to IT departments. (O’Reilly books are the attractive ones with the old-fashioned engravings of animals on the cover.)
Cost savings and flexibility
Anybody who has bought this kind of book knows that they cost about $40 each. And that many, especially the introductory ones, will be one-time-reads.
Avoid paying for stuff you don’t want
However useful and technically correct they may be, are marred by the grating bonhomie exemplified in this, taken almost at random from a pretty good Flash book we paid $45 for in pre-Safari days:
It’s completely mind-boggling why Macromedia didn’t introduce a spell checker into Flash before this version. Just because Flash doesn’t produce reams and reams of text doesn’t mean that the text that it does produce can’t be misspelled. Hey, even the best spellers among us misspell a word or two now and then, and need the occasional help of a spell checker. For those of us who can’t spell our way out of a paper bag (myself included), the spell checker is that much more of a blessing.
Yuck. That’s a lot to wade through in order to learn that Flash has a spell-checker, something we had not, in fact, noticed before.
With Safari, we pay $20 a month for a bookshelf of ten-books. The text is searchable — it’s a lot easier to find out how to do something by searching an authoritative book than by searching the web. There are other plans for bigger book shelves. But we generally replace one of two books a month, as something new comes up. I keep a few essential reference books like JavaScript:The Definitive Guide on the Safari shelf more or less permanently so I can look up stuff when the (physical) book isn’t at hand.