Kind of surprised that this book could be published by O'Reilly and also freely available online? Seems unusually generous.
Wouldn't have happened with a book with just sample pages.
Also as a way to increase my motivation to read it.
Plus I have money. This book costs about as much as a good bottle of wine or a bad bottle of whiskey.
Exactly.
A few years ago I did a really aggressive weeding out of my bookshelves as things were getting far too cluttered. In the process I threw out what must have been - at cover price - several thousand pounds worth of IT related books.
On the resale market they were all too stale to have any value (though I did manage to give a handful away to friends). In one way it was a bit painful, but those few thousand pounds worth of books has given me a huge (financial) return on that investment!
Cheap at the cost of a good bottle of wine ... for the foundations of a career!
I don't enjoy either but I have friends who decided to specialise and so I'm confident that you can easily reverse this split if you have decided you care more about one or the other.
I have this; I bought it because I want to reward the author for producing a quality work, and because I want to encourage the publishers to produce other works that would appeal to me.
I also happen to like physical texts so I bought the paperback but I have this and the digital edition. The latter is convenient for when I am travelling and appropriately formatted for an eReader (not just the raw html from these pages).
I have no trouble paying for physical books though.