There used to be a time where I would spend nearly a thousand dollars a year buying technical books to help me with my programming skills. But no more.
Over the course of the last two years I've transitioned from buying that technical book from my local bookstore or even online at Amazon or Chapters to using O'Reilly's Safari Books Online service. Before I get into the why I've changed my book buying habit, first let me introduce Safari Books Online.
Safari bills itself as the "e-preference library for programmers and IT professionals". O'Reily Media has brought together some 27 publishing companies including O'Reilly, Sams, Prentice Hall, Que, Addison-Wesley, Microsoft, Adobe etc. into Safari to provide their books to members who pay a monthly or yearly fee.
There are two types of subscriptions, Safari Library, Unlimited Access which provides you access to over 5000 books online, training videos, updates on coming books, Safari Labs, and large discounts if you want to buy a book. You can even download up to 5 chapters from any books during the course of a month. Pricing for this subscription is $42.99 USD a month or $472.89 per year. The other subscription choice is the Safari Bookshelf which allows you to search the entire collection, cut and past code from Safari, download 5 chapters per month and get the deep discount. You don't get unlimited access to read all the books online though. Personally, I have the unlimited account. This type of subscriptions will cost you $22.99 USD a month or $252.99 per year.
So why did I switch?
I switched primarily because it saves me a ton of money by not buying the books. The money can go into other things, like say, my retirement. But I had another reason as well. You could say that over the years I've become more aware of my personal impact on the environment. I'd like to think that with the small things I do that I'm helping with the green movement. I admit it's been a difficult transition from actually having the book physically in my hands, but gradually I've become use to reading the book online or downloading a chapter to my computer. In fact I think it's helped my productivity. It's easy to search through Safari and I can sort the books based on their publishing date giving me potentially the most up to date code, tools, ideas etc.
Today I received an email from Safari listing all the new books added to the collection. In going through I found two books that I've saved to my favorites that are relevant and timely. I look forward to going though them to see if there's anything useful for my current work. So in a nutshell I highly encourage anyone technically oriented to try Safari Online.