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Wired Magazine Profile of Tim O'Reilly 116

Posted by Zonk from the i-wish-i-had-radar dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Best-selling author Steven Levy has a new profile of techincal publisher Tim O'Reilly over at Wired." From the article: "... O'Reilly himself has operated for years under the radar. Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing company. It has a 15 percent share of the $400 million computer-book market but casts a much bigger shadow. O'Reilly books tend to colonize entire sections at Borders and Barnes & Noble, their distinctive cover design as recognizable as the Tide circle on a box of detergent or the Apple logo on the lid of a PowerBook. In serif type over a glossy white background, there is the title, often naming a computer language or protocol familiar to codeheads and gibberish to everyone else (JavaServer Faces; Essential CVS; Using Samba, 2nd Edition). The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals."
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Wired Magazine Profile of Tim O'Reilly More

Wired Magazine Profile of Tim O'Reilly

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  • Quality Lasts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:37PM (#13690577) Homepage Journal
    My O'Reilly _Programming perl_ book has survived unspeakable abuse for 10 years, without dropping a single page from its binding. While its content, layout and clarity of editorial is unparalleled in my three decades of paging through paper documentation, inviting thousands of hours of use. That's a quality product. Keep up the good work, Tim!

    • Re:Quality Lasts (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:42PM (#13690611) Homepage Journal
      FWIW, the fortune at the bottom of the page on which I submitted these messages reads:

      "The camel has a single hump; The dromedary two; Or else the other way around. I'm never sure. Are you? -- Ogden Nash"

      while the _Programming perl_ book's colophon says "the animal featured on the cover of Programming Perl is a camel, a one-humped dromedary", then refers to "the one-humped dromedary and the two-humped bactrian". Even Ogden Nash could have learned something useful from that handy O'Reilly edition.
    • Ditto, and don't you just love the layout? Too bad they changed it later on...

      (ok, i'm just going to do this once.... O RLY? [ytmnd.com])
      • I've been using that same book as my Perl reference manual since 4.00something. I haven't felt the need to look at any revision since. I know my way around that edition, and it's as handy as the language itself, which is possibly the most useful open source program other than Linux.
    • Spellcheck anyone? Come now, it really isn't all that difficult. (Techincal --> technical)

    • Re:Quality Lasts (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @08:34PM (#13690856) Homepage
      You know, ever since reading that book, I've come to this silly notion that there might be other books like it. That's very, very rare. Maybe C the Programming Language is close. Most other programming books just can't strike a balance between being indepth but also to the point. I was reading a book on WMI the other day and the author proceed to explain the history of WMI! He started with SNMP and then DMI, etc. then he explains why schema, etc. What I wanted wasn't until most of the way through the book and even that chapter wasn't very good. I ended up just Googling and found the one example everyone provides for creating WMI providers. The code was maybe 3 pages long but that's all it took for me to do what I needed.

      The Perl book was like those 3 pages with commentaries but for a few hundred pages instead. Even though Perl's philosophy is TIMTOWTDI, the book somehow manages to forsee any problems or questions that I would even up having as I read along. It gave a lot of details with useful examples but still managed to keep it all very central and never felt like he was straying from the topic. I got started on Perl with only some reading over dinner (I started, not mastered Perl at that point). Maybe it was Perl that made it so easy. I don't know. It was very amazing in retrospect. I still have that book and it was one of a small box of books I took with me when I moved after college even though I don't program in it anymore. That book is legendary.

      • Re:Quality Lasts (Score:5, Informative)

        by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @08:40PM (#13690884) Homepage Journal
        I think the "Camel" book, and Perl itself, are examples of successful products in general. They're products that are produced to meet people's demand for something, not a result of people's ability to produce something. In other words, give the people what they want, not just what you want to give them. The other O'Reilly books I've used, including _Unix in a Nutshell_, _Java in a Nutshell_ and other "Nutshell" books have all seemed to have that provenance. The K&R book, and C itself, as well. I think the "demand, not supply" design principle applies to all those products, and practically all the others I like.

      • Re:Quality Lasts (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's certainly legendary to me... I got my start with Perl while working as a student SA in college. My boss threw that book on my desk and said "We need a script written to do [this], and I think Perl would be a good language for you to write it in." I'd never heard of Perl, but I took the book home that evening, read it, and wrote the script the next day. About a year later I was maintaining the Perl FAQ. About two more years later, I was helping to write the second edition of the Camel. Eight year
      • Some of the O'Reilly books are really good, especially the Perl one mentioned above, but over the years, I've found the composition of my bookshelf shifting from the O'Reilly manual/tutorial/reference style books to a broader range of things, including more "classics", many of which come from Addison Wesley and PTR (see below for a gratuitous Amazon-spamming:-). O'Reilly seems to produce books that are really good at covering "today's hot buzzword" well, giving you a good overview of the technology, and en
    • I love Wired articles..they have a quality to them not found in most publications, you know? Now, I'd love to meet Mr. O'Reilly; he seems to be one of the few businessmen out there with the right worldview, even if it doesn't make him as much as the next guy. Makes me glad to see that such men still exist.

      • Tired (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @08:58PM (#13690959) Homepage Journal
        O'Reilly does seem to be a right-on visionary with a productive work ethic. I'm impressed that he's got 15% of the computer book market, with his high quality products. And his interviews have presented an articulate guy who's passionate about the right things, with a sharp BS detector.

        I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though. Ever since I first saw their prelaunch ads on SF buses in 1993-4, they've seemed like the _Omni_ mag of high-tech. Breathless marketing hype that's usually wrong about the implications of any tech trend they opportunistically hump like an Aibo on Marshall McLuhan's leg. I tried reading that insufferable windbag Nicholas Negroponte's book, _Being Digital_, compiled from his "prescient" _Wired_ endpaper columns. I had thought he guessed wrong whenever I read them in a crapper in the 1990s. In retrospect, they're not even good for toilet paper. And the rest of the magazine holds up just as poorly. Except for that terrific epic by Neal Stephenson about "the longest wire in the world". Even _Wired_ couldn't taint Stephenson, and apparently not O'Reilly, either.
        • Much agreed on Stephenson. I suppose like any publication, Wired depends most upon the quality of its writers. Granted, I don't subscribe; perhaps those articles I have read online were more the exception than the rule? At any rate, I have enjoyed what I have seen of the magazine.
          • Most of their content I've read since 1997 has been on the Web, linked from someone's page selecting a story (like the one we're discussing). That stuff has been much more worthwhile than the print edition's overall quality since 1994, AFAICT. Now, if someone can link to a _Wired_ article describing how we'll all rely on our social networks to link to magazine content we'll prefer over the magazine's own editors' selections, the circle will be complete :). But I'd rather just read the original visions in Mc
          • For around $20 you can get a years subscription to Wired. An amazing value. Pick up a copy next time you're at Safeways and fill out one of the blindingly bright yellow or orange subscription thingies :-)

        • Wired (Score:3, Funny)

          by Infonaut ( 96956 )
          I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though.

          How can you not be stoked about Wired. After all, they were totally prescient about push media. They predicted that Castanet and Active X would RULE [wired.com]

          They're not about hype. They're all about keepin' it real!

          • What's interesting about Wired predictions is that Castanet should rule, though it doesn't, and ActiveX should not, though it's still got a job. It's beyond hype: it's "delusion".
          • By Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, with contributions from other Wiredstaff: Erik Adigard, Andrew Anker, Ed Anuff, John Battelle, Chip Bayers, John Browning, Jim Daly, Pete Leyden, Hunter Madsen, Oliver Morton, Spencer Reiss, Louis Rossetto, and Carl Steadman.

            Apparently, the entire wired staff wrote that article.

            • Apparently, the entire wired staff wrote that article.

              Wired doesn't like to fess up to it, but they devoted an entire issue (this was back when a full Wired issue weighed in at just under a metric ton) to push media. When that issue came out, I knew Wired had jumped the shark (actually, this was before that term appeared, but you get my drift).

        • Bagging on "Wired".... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @12:50AM (#13691883) Journal
          Well, before I trash Wired too badly, I have to say that I had a subscription ever since issue #2, until some time around early 2000, when I finally decided it "jumped the shark" and wasn't worth the space it was taking up on my bookshelf, much less the subscription price.

          When it got started, I really enjoyed it. If nothing else, it seemed like most issues contained 1 really good interview with someone of importance in the tech. sector. It was the type of in-depth "we describe the person's character and workplace/home life in so much detail, you feel like you're watching this unfold on TV rather than reading" article, that really got them to make some statements that gave you insight into *why* they got where they were at that time, and where they thought their business was heading in the future. Plus, it had none of the editing you'd expect other mainstream rags would have done if they had conducted the same interview. (If the guy said "My main competitor fucked up!" - they printed it.)

          They also seemed to be strong in scooping other science and tech. magazines on news about a new invention or interesting implementation of an existing technology (especially in medicine and biotech).

          But it seemed like the combination of .com area millionaires, inflated I.T. salaries overall, and a tendency to glorify modern art and flashy/trendy doo-datd and gadgets poisoned Wired. The "fluff" became the "substance". The magazine got really thick in '99 with glossy full-page color ads for multi-thousand dollar designer watches, luxury cars and clothing. Then when it all came crashing down, the magazine went on a diet - losing about half of its thickness overnight. And quality never really came back..... You could comb a good article or two out of one, here or there. But it was best suited as something to download into your PDA for free using AvantGo, or via web links to specific articles of interest.
          • I subscribed starting with issue #3, and bagged it sometime around 1997 or 1998. Too much of the ridiculous libertarian ethos, too many profiles of CEOs (as others have said), too much gushing over ephemeral trends. I can't remember when I thought the magazine had finally jumped the shark, but surely the Zippies cover and accompanying article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/covers1994.html [wired.com] was a true, frog-in-the-well bit of embarassment, both for the magazine and the person (i.e., me) who had to lug
        • I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though.

          There have been some diamonds in that sea of coal. As you mention later on, the article "Mother Earth Motherboard" was possibly the greatest technical/historical article ever written. Here's [wired.com] Wired's copy. Here's [datavibe.net] another. And another. [j-bradford-delong.net]
        • I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though. Ever since I first saw their prelaunch ads on SF buses in 1993-4, they've seemed like the _Omni_ mag of high-tech.
          I can't stand Wired. I was an early subscriber. Then I noticed that their covers were making various CEOs out to be folk heros (didn't save the covers, I wonder how many have been indicted meanwhile?). Finally, they had Newt Gringrich on the cover. Esther Dyson did a gushing, fawning interview with him. They never mentioned that she was on h
          • Bingo: Wired is SI Newhouse's way of making science fiction into real political and economic wealth. Dyson is a poster child: she's a fraud, running on the momentum of her brilliant physicist father. What a mess she made of ICANN, to the point where foreigners are demanding the US relinquish what was once universally respected fair administration of the Net. I wonder what McLuhan, their "patron saint", would say, if we could pull him out of the air like Woody Allen did ins _Annie Hall_. I think he'd say "wh
        • Ironically I've found Make Magazine, published by O'Reilly, to be the very thing that I originally hoped Wired would be.

          I read a few issues of Wired and then stopped bothering. I read the first issue of Make and subscribed. Eagerly awaiting issue 4.
          • I lament the demise of _Mondo 2000_, and _Reality Hackers_ before it, when _Wired_ bit its mojo so hard that all its oxygen was sucked away. Really, where is the freakazoid tech mag to keep the fringe fired and informed? _The Resonance Project_ is gone, too, and don't you say "Slashdot"...

      • Re:Why wired is great (Score:3, Interesting)

        by DrZaius ( 6588 )
        I've had the pleasure of seeing him speak twice. The first time was around '99 at UBC at some sort of thing ActiveState was putting on. At that point it was just plain cool to see the guy who publishes all the excellent books I'd been buying.

        The next time was at the MySQL conference last April. After he did a keynote, I went up and talked to him. He had a few William Gibson references in his presentation. I asked him about that and we chatted for a few minutes. We exchanged business cards and that was about

    • My O'Reilly _Programming perl_ book has survived unspeakable abuse for 10 years

      Uh, ten years? (Looks inside cover at book next to monitor.)

      Go get the five year old third edition! If you have the 2nd, it is a big win.

      (1st Edition was better than the 2nd but too damn old to even consider.)

      While its content, layout and clarity of editorial is unparalleled in my three decades of paging through paper documentation, inviting thousands of hours of use.

      I really can't believe you're talking about t

    • I left a couple of them in my car, in the sun, for too long. The plastic glue/binding stuff melted. Oops.

      My only real complaint is that they don't use TeX or LaTeX for the typesetting, but they generally look good enough.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:38PM (#13690590)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:15%? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by notasheep ( 220779 )
      I've worked in the computer book publishing market for a long time - the 15% share is because they're successful only in a very small segment of the market. In fact, you'll start seeing a lot more "Windoze Wanker" books out of them soon - they see MS products (and consumer titles) as the areas where they can grow their business. It will be interesting to see if the technical audience that has formed the O'Reilly core will remain faithful as they "dirty" themselves publishing "Windoze" titles.

      They're kind of
      • As long as they carry on producing quality titles for the whole technical arena who gives a toss if they also produce books for non-techies too? Anyone who falls out with O'Reilly over something that trivial deserves to have to do without some of the most excellent reference books around.

  • and Tim has a blog (Score:5, Informative)

    by acomj ( 20611 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:40PM (#13690601) Homepage
    Tim Oreilly has a blog...

    http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/ [oreilly.com]

    the other posters are interesting as welll

    http://radar.oreilly.com/ [oreilly.com]
  • ...mentions [wired.com], among other things, Ruby on Rails [rubyonrails.org].

    Seems like Rails is turning up everywhere. One thing's for sure, it's one of the main reasons that RubyForge now has (and needs) five file mirrors [blogs.com]!

    I'm working on a Rails app now that has both an XML-RPC front end and a web front end; it's been pretty fun to learn all the little ways Rails reduces the amount of scaffolding code in an application. Good times!
  • summery
    i mean we all know what they look like rather intimately
    The just had to be something informative in the artical
    so why not at least hint at that.
    • i mean we all know what they look like rather intimately
      The just had to be something informative in the artical
      so why not at least hint at that.

      I'm not sure I'd cast stones if I were you. ;-)

  • Tim O'Reilly is the genuine article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayagu&gmail,com> on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:44PM (#13690621) Journal

    I accidentally met O'Reilly at a Linux conference in North Carolina a number of years back. We chatted it up about Linux, where we thought it might be going, what we thought Linux might say at the keynote address (turned out to be the year Linus said he would, "never, never, again write code to minimize memory to small memory machines...", a scary statement, but interestingly enough still to this day Linux is comparably resource thrifty), and small talk (not the language).

    He was soft spoken and unassuming. Somewhere in the course of discussion we introduced ourselves to each other. I remember walking away thinking what a nice guy, and an interesting coincidental name with the publisher. Yeah, it was the Tim O'Reilly, and I didn't figure it out until I saw him speak later that day. Wow.

    His presentation was low key, more about rallying the community than circling the wagons. Here was truly a man with a vision and understanding about the fabric of technology. Oh that the leaders of many more of our technology companies could be of his ilk.

    (As an interesting aside (to me), this was also the same conference at which I met ESR, same way, just striking up a conversation after a presentation. When time began to run out I told him I had to move along, I wanted to get to the Eric Raymond presentation. He smiled and let me go, telling me he'd see me there. LOL)

  • I have to say Make Magazine is great publication. It was horrendously slow to obtain a subscription but the information is valuable.

  • OReilly used to be the default, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:48PM (#13690644)
    In the past, when I'd needed a book on subject X, I'd just go the bookstore and pick up the OReilly Subject X In A Nutshell or the Definitive Guide To Subject X. Lately, I've been burned by a few duds. The quality over at ora.com is slipping. Now, they're only producing something like two orders of magnitude more books than they were 10 years ago, but still, it makes me sad. They're on the same level as Wrox now. Not that there's anything awful about that, Wrox is pretty damn good, but they've lost the default go-to position, for me at least.

  • My brush with greatness... (Score:3, Funny)

    by barfy ( 256323 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:50PM (#13690654)
    Was when I found Tim's business card at the Cafe In bldg 18 at Microsoft. It was like finding RMS *buying* a beer or something...

  • Most nontechies, if they know him at all, know him by the eponymous name of his publishing company.

    If you asked my parents they would think of the loudmouthed guy with a TV show. I'm sure they've never heard of the publishing company... in any case not everybody who is "techie" knows about O Reilly, I didn't until about two years ago, or at least I was aware of the books but never bought one.

  • No fanfare, just the real deal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FishandChips ( 695645 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @07:59PM (#13690708) Journal
    It's very hard to make money out of publishing, so I guess the guy is a genius really. He's also got recognition. When I go into a shop I'll very likely buy the O'Reilly book out of the choices available because I know I'll get a solid number from a company worth supporting. So many other outfits are just faceless conglomerates owned by a monster toad somewhere. And with some topics, an O'Reilly book will be the only choice available anyway.

    There is some competition, I guess. My local Borders has some nice titles from No Starch Press in among the O'Reilly ones. Too bad there isn't one title on Debian from anyone stocked, though. It would be good to see more No Starch books. They're a little more hip and sometime a row of O'Reilly can look a bit staid.

    I once mail-ordered a book from O'Reilly and they sent me the wrong one. When I called them, they said they'd send out a replacement pdq (which they did) and told me I could keep the other, wrong one with their compliments. No need to inconvenience myself by returning it. It's a great book too. You have to respect a company like that.

    Still have all my O'Reilly books. They are really well put together unlike most these days.
    • so I guess the guy is a genius really

      The secret is this: make consistently high-quality books with recognizable brand marks.
    • There is some competition, I guess.

      Kinda...not really. The IT industry is full of bad books - REALLY bad books. There are so many new things coming out, and so people are trying to publish stuff as quickly as possible. With a few exceptions (such as, for instance document publishing languages and compiler tech), things change a lot.

      O'Reilly publishing has been the only company that delivers any kind of consistency. That's a really big deal, because all of the computer books sell for around $50! $50 for something that has 1% useful information and 99% stuff the author picked up on some website somewhere isn't worth it at all.

      When you first start learning a new technology, its really hard to tell which books are giving you fluff and which have good stuff that will actually help you. So you have to rely on someone else. Friends work out, but only to a point.

      Inevitably there will be some areas that you know more about than any of your tech friends, (or you know nothing and neither do they), and you have to trust strangers. I pay for O'Reilly books because O'Reilly stands behind the quality of them, and I can usually trust that I'm going to get a lot out of them.

      Oh, and for the tried and true commonly available areas - like perl 5, or html they've got some REALLY high quality gems.
    • There is some competition ... No Starch

      O'Reilly handles distribution and printing for No Starch Press...

  • O'reilly books... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ToasterofDOOM ( 878240 ) <d.murphy.davis@gmail.com> on Friday September 30, 2005 @08:05PM (#13690738)
    ...are nothing short of incredible and life-saving. I use my Python Pocket Reference almost daily, and it has been an invaluable resource. O'reilly is, and should be, the first place to look for technical writing, and almost always surpasses the competition in quality, clarity, and accuracy.
  • O'Reilly didn't used to publish a lot of Windows-specific book titles. They were cooler back in the era when they mainly published books for the classic UNIX tools (i.e. SED/Awk, the multi-volume X Windows Reference series (which is a quite COMPLETE reference for X if you run it bareboned with good old TWM) and even some of the BSD manual volumes. Toward the end of the 90's geek-chic sort of damaged the whole scene. Now they publish comix.

    They do produce some of the best Windows-oriented books, of course
    • I mainly knew of O'Reilly because of the de facto reference works for X during my degree in the early-to-mid nineties. As I recall I spent the mornings^Wlunch in the bar and the afternoons in class.

      Ah, those wasted afternoons.

      Can you spare a quarter?
    • the multi-volume X Windows Reference series (which is a quite COMPLETE reference for X if you run it bareboned with good old TWM)

      Yep, amongst the first tech stuff O'Reilly ever published, as I recall. (Glances over at bookshelf...) The "Rainbow Series" (each volume a different color, no animals) takes up just shy of two feet of shelf space. The stuff on Motif and XView may be a little dated, but the rest is still invaluable if you're doing X Windows coding.
  • I am far more familiar with the "XXX for Dummies" books.
    • Surely you can't be serious! They're at least as distinctive as the Foo for Dummies books -- it's difficult to miss a book with the title in a big colored box, with a pretty animal woodcut [oreilly.com] underneath it.

      It's like picking up a book with "Don't Panic" printed in nice friendly letters on the cover and wondering what it could be...
    • I am far more familiar with the "XXX for Dummies" books.

      I think XXX sort of explains itself.

    • I started out as a computer trainer at the time that the first in the Dummies series came out - DOS for Dummies. As much as the series is now rather overdone, I have to admit that Dan Gookin [wambooli.com] and IDG had come up with an excellent formula for regular folks to learn technology. Dummies' competition at the time were gargantuan software books by Queue and Wiley that often were padded with lengthy chapters of software esoterica. Instead, the Dummies books focused on how to get things done rather using specific

  • Right on, Tim. Keep up the good work.

  • animals? Bah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 ) * on Friday September 30, 2005 @08:49PM (#13690921)
    "The illustrations are realistically rendered pen-and-ink drawings of animals."

    How dare you call this man [amazon.com] an animal! Don't you have any respect for fine gentlemen?!

    • Re:animals? Bah! (Score:4, Funny)

      by game kid ( 805301 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @09:38PM (#13691150) Homepage

      He looks gentle...but pair him with a needy wife (or a comparable Windows PC) and he's a rowdy outlaw biker.

      His face reminds me of Poe [google.com] for some reason. I can imagine Poe running Red Hat, though While I wondered, nearly napping, what the hell this GNU GRUB thingy is doesn't seem like good poetry...

    • At the bottom of this page you will find the QOTD.

      A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. -- H.H. Munro, "Saki"

      Saki [jonrennie.com]

      Seems to be the same Folk
    • How dare you call this man an animal! Don't you have any respect for fine gentlemen?!

      So wait - if "Learning Perl" is the "Camel Book", shouldn't this edition of Running Linux be known as the "Chapbook"?

  • Not, pen and ink, but woodcuts (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The animals on the covers are not pen-and-ink, they are based on 19th century woodcuts.

  • O'Really! (Score:4, Funny)

    by snuf23 ( 182335 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @08:52PM (#13690934)
    I generally love O'reilly books and also get quite a kick out of the O'Really parodies [bofhcam.org]. Everything from "Windows NT's Infernal Filesystem" to "Practical UNIX Terrorism". These are great t-shirts if just for the look on a fellow techies face when they read the title.
  • Just add my name to the chorus that says O'Reilly's books rule. (Just in case he's reading this)

    They're one of the few tech book companies (the rest are long defunct) that I'll happily buy the book for without even skimming it to make sure it's not a BS "tech book" (you other "codeheads" out there know what I mean).

    Even when the book turns out not to have exactly what I need. I'm always learning something else about the subject that comes in handy later.

    So, again, SALUTE!

  • SNR (Score:4, Informative)

    by Hans Lehmann ( 571625 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @09:20PM (#13691061)
    As an engineer, I'll put this in engineering terms; O'Reilly books have a high signal to noise ratio. The amount of useful information that they contain per inch of shelf space is equaled by no other publisher, period.
  • I always felt a reluctance to the O'Reilly book because I thought they were published by Bill O'Reillys publishing company (I'm not a big fan of Bill O'Reilly).

    I always saw those books and thought "hell no, I won't support that son of a b***h".

    After reading this story today I might actually tak a look at his books.

  • Good stuff (Score:5, Funny)

    by xgamer04 ( 248962 ) <xgamer04NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday September 30, 2005 @09:40PM (#13691160)
    This was a- good article, but -I keep thinking- some-thing's wrong with it. I just can-'t put my finger on it,- though...

  • O'Reilly's Travel Books (Score:3, Interesting)

    by coaxial ( 28297 ) on Friday September 30, 2005 @11:15PM (#13691549) Homepage
    Everyone knows the high quality of ORA's technical books, but what about their travel books? I only know of them through the old ORA printed catalogs of the mid 90s. I've always assumed that the travel books would be to an equally high standard, but I've never actually seen one. If anyone has, I'd love to hear about them.

    • Re:O'Reilly's Travel Books (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tadghin ( 2229 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @11:24AM (#13693592) Homepage
      The travel books are not published by O'Reilly itself, but by another company I started called Travelers Tales. See http://www.travelerstales.com./ [www.travelerstales.com]

      I like to think they are pretty good - they've won lots of awards and get the same kind of glowing praise from their readers as our technical books.

      They aren't guidebooks per se, but rather collections of stories about places, to give you an idea of what the place is like before you go, or if you're just an armchair traveler.
  • Cutesy to the point of banality.
  • I once got an unsolicited email from Tim. He said, I am the guy who publishes the animal books, we need to talk...and we most certainly did. He is a pretty cool guy.

  • those distinctive covers use public domain art (Score:3, Informative)

    by jacobito ( 95519 ) on Saturday October 01, 2005 @10:31AM (#13693383) Homepage

    IP geeks may be interested to know that the illustrations on O'Reilly's covers are generally public domain works from the Dover pictorial archive [doverpublications.com]. Dover Publications, if you don't know, is an invaluable publishing house that specializes in budget-priced literature and art books (especially clip art); many, perhaps most, of their publications use public domain material.

    (As an aside, you may also be interested to know that their clip art collections aren't entirely unemcumbered -- while the individual works are public domain, their collections are copyrighted derivative works, and they place limits on commercial use [funnystrange.com] of art from their collections.)

    • While we began our animal covers using Dover clip art, we didn't end there. We now have a large collection of 19th century books containing original woodcuts (the same source that Dover used to build their collections). In addition, a number of the illustrations are contemporary. We have found people (notably Lorrie Lejeune) who were able to make pen and ink images that matched the woodcut style. See if you can identify the contemporary images without looking at the Colophon...
  • No discussion of O'Reilly is complete without a link to True in a Nutshell [miketaylor.org.uk]. Enjoy.
  • I met Tim O'Reilly at Gnomedex in '03 (before Chris Pirillo went Hollywood on us Midwesterners and moved it to California) where he was speaking about Open Source. As he spoke I found a copy of a previous Powerpoint from a similar but not identical talk he had previously given, and updated to exactly match his Gnomedex talk. He graciously gave me permission to post the presentation [trygstad.org] on my blog and was a real pleasure to meet and talk to. He's a real down-to-earth guy. I'm told the other famous Tim in IT, Sir

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