Buy 1 get 1 sale at O'Reilly. What are some good startup or tech-related books? | Hacker News Reader

Buy 1 get 1 sale at O'Reilly. What are some good startup or tech-related books?

oreilly.com

37 pointsjroes36 comments

My book, Ruby Best Practices is listed here, but you can download a free PDF copy instead: http://rubybestpractices.com

Sandal! Let me thank you ever so much for writing that amazing book! I learned so much about Ruby, and just coding in general. Even the appendices were great. Great balance of good examples and humor. Thanks!

I'm reading JavaScript: The Good Parts. Pretty good.

I also really like Make: Electronics. It's extremely well done, outstanding layout and graphics, excellent content, if you want to get started hacking hardware.

BTW, apparently this sale is only for e-books, not paper.

There's also the Google Tech Talk from the author:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook

I'm a big fan of JavaScript: The Good Parts, but it doesn't appear on the list of books for sale.

It isn't on the list, but the discount code still worked for me. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/

"Programming Collective Intelligence" is quite good. I like "The Ruby Programming Langauge" if it's something you're interested in. "Learning Python" is probably beneath you but it'd be a good gift for someone who wants to learn programming. I've heard good things about "Real World Haskell" but haven't read it.

Anyone interested in Haskell should get RWH. I forgot about it in my earlier comment, but it's well worth the $ (though there are free versions).

Programming Scala by Alex Payne and Dean Wampler. It's a great companion to the Odersky/Venners book which is (in my view, which is far from unanimous) better as a reference or a follow-up rather than as a tutorial.

I think I just found this book online as well: http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/

Yes, there is a free copy (similar to Real World Haskell) online, which is one of the reason I purchase O'Reilly books.

I don't know if I'll just come off as an ass but have you tried Safari Books (http://my.safaribooksonline.com/) yet? Monthly subscription fee is about 25 bucks and it gives you unlimited access to most books from o'reilly and some from Apress as well. I think it's a much better alternative to the deal at hand.

My only recommendation wrt Safari Books is that you use the download tokens in a timely manner. A while back I lost something like 20-30 of them because the subscription lapsed, and unless they've changed it, once you lose them, they're gone forever.

And that sucks IMHO.

I agree about the download tokens. How they are handled is the only thing I dont like about the safari service. You get five per month and unused tokens last only for three months after which they disappear. So unless you keep track and download some book chapters every month you are likely losing tokens. That being said I think its a compliment to the service that this minor point is my only gripe against it.

I believe different plans have different terms on the token amount/length - my corporate plan gives me something like 50 tokens to use in a year.

Guys, there is a checkbox under "Email Preferences" that allows you to be alerted when your tokens are about to expire! Great feature

My school library's subscription gets me unlimited access to the service. I wasn't aware about the book expiration issue. Good to know about it because I'll be graduating soon and I plan to subscribe to the service on my own.

Even public libraries have Safari subscriptions, e.g. Harris County Public Library (Houston area). There are different versions of Safari, so some things are missing from this more public subscription, but there is a lot of stuff in there for free, after logging in with a library card.

In the Safari settings, you can turn on a reminder email for soon-to-expire tokens. Does that not work? (I'd better check, I've received no reminder email and I must have some close to expiring.)

I signed up when they had a promotion: The unlimited account, normally $40-something a month, at $30/month for the first year.

Today, I find I need to learn/abuse some Joomla (not my choice). A Safari book will, I think, more quickly give me a coherent overview.

EDIT: Just checked -- my tokens are valid for 6 months from the date of issue.

The reason this is better is because their ebooks are DRM-free. Not so with Safari's books. When you use the download tokens from Safari, you get a book that is riddled with watermarks and legal threats on every single page.

When I'm reading a book having a legal threat with my name embedded in it at both ends of every single page is extremely distracting and makes the book nigh-unreadable.

I let my download tokens expire on purpose because what you get with them is garbage.

Thanks. I was not aware of this, not having used any tokens, yet. Disappointing.

From the HN thread about the O'Reilly ebook sale a couple months ago, I found these suggestions helpful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368200

I'm half-way through Real World Haskell. There's a free online version, but I find it easier to read off actual paper than my shitty screens. It's a really good book, and alongside, say, Learn Me a Haskell, is a good introduction to get you started with the language.

I mean this in the nicest possible way, but: do you actually read tech books? and which kinds?

Speaking for myself, I've found that I make nearly zero use of technical reference books. K&R is about the only counterexample that I can think of. In fact, for me, buying a book about some technology seems like it decreases the chances of me actually learning it.

I read non-technology-specific non-reference books, but sadly a lot slower than I buy.

Working in a second hand bookstore for most of my student years drilled home to me that for most people, self included, buying books is many times easier (and more frequent) than reading them.

(Despite this, I still <3 books.)

It's like buying an expensive gym membership. The upfront cost will force you to carry through ... even though it doesn't.

FWIW, I just noticed my book "Beginning Ruby" is on a $10 one day deal at Apress: http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal (for the next few hours only..) See http://beginningruby.org/ for more book specific info.

Apress also note on Twitter that they've totally randomized how the daily deal works so you never know what book of theirs might turn up tomorrow. Seems a good deal if you keep looking for books you might want to buy cheap.

<plug> My book 'Programming Windows Azure' :) </plug>

Anyone here read CouchDB: The Definitive Guide? I noticed it was written in January; how much has changed with the 1.0 release earlier this month? Still a worthwhile read?

It's all online for free: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/

Bought the PDF and was really happy with it as a reference. Used it to write YARCAL (yet another Ruby Couch adapter lib). Although that was for 0.10.x and I didn't follow Couch much after that - no idea what kind of changes have occurred since then.

I haven't had a useful O'Reilly book since the Perl books came out about a decade ago.

I highly recommend the pocket reference guides - those things are huge time-savers. I use the LINQ pocket guide constantly and the T-SQL pocket guide is another one I use quite often.

High Performance MySQL is pure gold!

My favorite book is "How the Internet makes programming books mostly irrelevant"

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.. your statement, although not true for most theory pieces, does hold true for any kind of reference or API text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com