50% off O'Reilly ebooks and videos today | Hacker News Reader

50% off O'Reilly ebooks and videos today

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80 pointsvijayr43 comments

Can anyone comment on the quality of O'Reilly books these days? I used to read them long long ago but then their editing standards seemed to take a dive and companies like Apress and pragprog started producing much better quality.

I can only speak anecdotally, not across a wide sample of books. But as an author, O'Reilly's editing staff is way better than Apress.

I haven't written for the prags but I like their books.

as always it depends on the series or topic. myself, i read some of their blogs (esp nat torkington) but rarely read their books any more. i can get what i want elsewhere, for free. if i do pay for a tech book it's usually not a manual or anything tied to a specific version of anything but instead broad paradigms.

they did, it seems, go for "filler" instead of "killer".

So far I haven't found a single book that I can't get from Amazon for less than their 50% sale price (or with a $1 difference). I think they need to re-evaluate their pricing structure.

What I dislike about Amazon, though, is that you don't get the PDF, only "Kindle Edition".

I think he's referring to the print books.

I buy ebooks from o'reilly; idk why anyone would purchase a technical ebook from Amazon if they weren't forced to.

I much prefer the value I get from O'Reilly. No DRM. Any format I could want. The PDF is especially useful for technical material.

i cant help but wonder why on earth they're giving promotions without preparing their infrastructure. reminds me of "free ebook from Packt" promo that lasted for days but never managed to get any since the website was always down.

the one that went well was Pragmatic Programmer, bought an Arduino ebook. it was posted here last week. those who complain that book promo shouldn't be here have their reason, but i'm glad i see this kind of promo in HN.

I'm happy to see relevant promos here as well because I would miss out on them otherwise, but it's a slippery slope.

Perhaps we could have a convention for post titles or a separate section for them?

Apologies if this idea has been floated and rejected before.

I missed the PragProg one, slightly disappointed now I've found out about it.

The free ebook from Packt was a slight disaster, hopefully they're getting on top of it now.

So far as I know, the PragProg discount is still valid[1]. I think it's valid all day today. Load up your cart, and as you go through the purchasing process, there's a button to apply coupons. Click there, and enter the word TURKEY (not sure if it's case sensitive; all caps works for me). That should get you a 40% discount. Enjoy.

[1] Yup, just confirmed. Here's the original blog post, which I'll submit to HN as well: http://pragprog.com/news/black-friday-cyber-monday-40-off-sa....

Oh, awesome thanks. Got myself confused on the expiry time.

> Our site is temporarily unavailable due to routine maintenance.

Isn't it weird to do a maintenance during a sale?

I suspect they don't mean that. I'll wager that's a default message and that, in fact, their site is overloaded.

I'm fairly certain that if you create an account with o'reilly, you get a 'buy one get one free' code for their ebooks, so with two books it basically works out to be 50% off anyway, any day of the year.

I'm getting 60% off today, not sure why. Also, one could wish to buy just one book and would still get a good discount today on that one instead of paying the full price for one and having another as an offer.

You get 60% off on orders over $100, so you've probably stocked up on ebooks :)

I know I did :)

Bought 6 ebooks, and I'm happy it was posted and upvoted on HN, otherwise, I would have missed it.

I could use a good book on learning Javascript. Anyone have any recommendations?

Background: I'm not a programmer, I just do some things in my spare time. I did a little something with Django and Bootstrap over the weekend, but I could really only use Bootstrap for the CSS to make it look good without knowing how the Javascript end works. So I'm not completely new to programming though still really a beginner but would be completely new to Javascript.

Eloquent Javascript seems to be pretty highly recommended. You can buy it from O'Reilly, but the author also offers it for free online[0].

0: http://eloquentjavascript.net/

(The pay version is newer. I haven't read it, can't comment on the differences.)

Is it? The last modified date on the free web version seems to be October 30, 2012. That's less than a month ago, whereas the print version on Amazon was published in February 2011.

eloquentjavascript.net says "I have published a revised version of the book on paper. The structure of this version remained largely the same, but the whole text has been thoroughly edited and updated."

I would suggest starting off with Codecademy (http://codecademy.com/) first.

The DRM-free is nice, and they get some large amount of points for doing so.

But ads in hacker news, masquerading as an article? Can we keep commercials out please?

(interesting to see that people are not contesting that the link/title is an actually an ad, but that people are arguing that ads should exist because they are useful. The role and appropriateness of ads alongside other content looks to be a controversial subject.)

Still though, I'd probably not have heard about it otherwise

Thats what banners/newsletters and ads in TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky are for. But not in news aggregators, no siree.

Absolutely, promoting other useful products to the community is not in any way what HN is about. You should be here pushing your own startup, useful or not, or reading some pointless blog of someone just because they started yet another picture sharing service that will be dead tomorrow, or fawning over whomever the latest superstar is.

But one day sales on useful information that would otherwise be missed by many users here? Oh no, there's a group think to be maintained.

Who thought it was an article? Some sort of O'Reilly coupon gets posted a couple times a year. In fact, deeply discounted tech books from most publishers are welcome.

What you're suppose to do here is recommend great books on the list.

Are you saying that the goal of hacker news is to post commercial ads with coupons for people to see? Really? that's the goal of this site?

I wouldn't mind an article which talked about different books and in that context, which just happened to mentioned that there was a sale going on with 50% off. That would give room of discussion. But this is just a text banner ad with a open comment field. If it had been a real banner, positioned at the right side of the screen, I would not complain as it would be clear that its an ad and not ordinary content. I would even consider a small disclaimer tag in the title ([hacker news commercial] to be fair, but to actually be listed as any other news article?

You are taking this way too seriously. Posts like this are rare. Also very useful. I have bought ebooks before in sales which I came to know via HN. As the GP said the best part was the discussion by people about the books they are buying and why.

If you don't like this post, flag it.

> Are you saying that the goal of hacker news is to post commercial ads

Are you suggesting that O'Reilly paid to have this link posted to HN? That's not correct. They didn't. Someone saw the offer, knew that many people on HN would find it useful, and posted it.

It's valid to not like it, and to ignore it or flag it, but don't dislike it for something that didn't happen.

I dont think they paied for it, and I dont dislike O'Reilly. They didnt do anything here beyond having a sale and selling non-drm products. Like I initially said, they get major points for this.

I only pointed out that this is an ad promoting a sale. No one seams to contest that. What people seems to have an issue with is the claim that ads should not sit alongside other articles.

It would be interesting to hear why having a ad promoting a sale posted in a news aggregate is a good thing, or why in this case we should have an exception that sites like amazon or newsegg does not deserve. After all, they too have done 1 day's sales, some very interesting for hackers. Thus, I am failing to find an attribute that this ad differ from all other ads. Does anyone has an insight to what that attribute is?

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't know if it's Great or not, but I never knew of CLR via C# before the sale (depressing since it's in it's 4th edition)

Thanks to the sale info I've found the answer to one of my self-education questions, "how can I learn about the CLR in an accessible manner?"

Clearly there are two things going on here that you seem to object to:

1) People actually find this link useful.

2) People don't want you to be the judge of what is appropriate on hacker news.

Look there are always going to be links like this because people here like them.

Whether it's book coupons or links to getting a free Chrome book from Google or free phones from Microsoft or Blackberry for developing apps, these links people find valuable.

If it bothers you, then just skip it and move on.

FYI, every day at O'Reilly is 50 percent off ebooks. If you're a logged in member, one of the perpetual in house ads will be for a code for "Buy 1 ebook, get 1 free"

Also FYI, the most recent purchase I made was a book that made HN's front page last week: interactive Data Vizualization for the Web. And I highly recommend it

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do

I recommend joining the mailing list too. There's one book on sale nearly every day, and a category (e.g. Python, Ruby, data mining, etc.) every few weeks. If you aren't in a rush to buy your books, keep a wishlist and pick them up as they go on sale.

Thanks for the recomendation, I just bought the book. I am trying to learm more about visualizations (and D3). Any other recomendation?

The cupboard seems dry in terms of D3 right now. But there seem to be quite a few good books with R. The ggplot2 book is great, but I don't think it's on O'Reilly http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Analysis-eboo...

50% off is not the same as buy one, get one free. Let's say each Ebook costs $10. On a "buy one, get one free" deal, I have spent $10. On a 50% off deal, I have spent $5

website is slow as molasses. Cant even buy a book!

Apress.com has a $15 eBook special on all Apress and Springer eBooks today only and they were already very slow at midnight Eastern Standard Time when it started!

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