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USA Today on O'Reilly Covers 84

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
jbc writes "USA Today has an article on O'Reilly's animal cover art. If you're like me, and are an obsessive collector of these books, you'll find it interesting. If not, you probably won't. "
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USA Today on O'Reilly Covers

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  • It started out as a decent article about O'Reilly's "animal book" history. But the moment I read "shareware Linux programming language," my interest in the article, and any good reputation USA Today ever had, went down the drain in a hurry. Blech.

    Volumes on the shareware Windows programming language feature pictures of kamikaze warplanes and Amtrak trains, because "Windows likes to crash," O'Reilly says.
  • Sorry about the train thing. I actually prefer trains than aircraft myself, and they are quite safe in reality. It's just Amtrak's reputation. Have you heard this one?

    "I found out that maglev trains work by hovering a few inches above the track. I wish Amtrak trains stayed that close to the track."

    One of the most memorable train rides I took was on the Shinkansen in Japan, from Yokohama to Tokyo. The next train ride was on Amtrak, from New York to Washington. I call tell you that on the Amtrak train I was holding on for dear life. There's never I time when the train stays still!
  • That line is directly from the article. I think this falls under the "How many inaccuracies can you fit in one sentence" category.

    *sigh*
  • I sent in a nice constructive feedback note to correct this error. Hopefully they'll get it right next time.
  • is a daemon an "animal" or a concept? Makes me wonder what will be on the cover of BSD books ORA is going to make :)
  • There was a poll [slashdot.org]done last November. No comments are available tho, but it does give you some idea. These books are pretty much the only books I use. I own about 10 or 12, and I've never been disappointed with one.
  • There was a poll [slashdot.org] done last November. No comments are available tho, but it does give you some idea. These books are pretty much the only books I use. I own about 10 or 12, and I've never been disappointed with one.
  • www.mcp.com [mcp.cpm]

    They have some books available for free web viewing there. I wonder if people actually buy them?

  • Posted by OGL:

    "The shareware Linux programming language"???

    Barf!!!

    -W.W.
  • isnt anything in print by definition outdated?
  • i also prefer online docs. printed docs are often
    out of date (except for classics, like the C programming language). anyway, i think you may
    have a bad monitor or the lights in that room are
    too dim. these things can strain your eyes,
    sometimes causing a headache. it also helps for
    some people to have a high (at least 75) refresh rate.

    that said, books that deal more with concept i do
    prefer in print. like the math book im learning from. (my school, the Army and Navy Academy in
    Carlsbad, sucked so i have to teach myself now)
    but that which is more syntax is far better in print. using man pages is still easier than looking something some obscure function call in an
    appendix.
  • If the article were about Linux, and made that kind of mistake, it would be worth that kind of reaction. But the article was about O'Reilly, so that error doesn't really deserve much more than a previous poster's "*sigh*"...
  • It's funny, but whenever I see that cover, I always picture something simular, but with a VERY prominent blue a$$..
  • Well at least one of their books is available online (I mean in addition to the hardcopies of the linux NAG and such). Their Palm Programming book (rock dove cover, if anyone cares) is available on the 3Com palm developer's webpage. Of course I found this out about an hour after I got home from impulse-buying the hardcopy at an expensive-ish bookstore. Buggerit.
  • I really don't understand how someone can prefer the online version to a printed version. Granted, this is only my opinion, but if I spend too much time looking at a screen full of text (i.e., the hours that a technical book might require) I get a bad case of eye strain.

    Also, there is something relaxing about sitting back in a chair with a book, even if it's a text book or technical book. I really wish that opinion was more prevelant now-a-days. There is not much that is more benifical that reading. I guess if it doesn't bother your eyes reading online can be just as good, though.

    Anyway.
  • There was a poll on this in november. Here [slashdot.org]. A large number of people have either none or 9+, and the average appears to be around 4.22.

    Altho I agree this mite be an appropriate time to rehash the poll.

    Log

  • Quick! Name a publishing company that saw its profits increase when they started giving away electronic copies of their titles...

    Really, folks, I dont see why "open sourcing" books is desirable on the same level as open sourcing software. Its two completely different things.

    O'Reilly is in the business to to publish books and make money. Giving out free electronic copies of their titles is antithetical to the latter of these. When someone comes around who can publish better books and give them away for free, then I guess O'Reilly's day will be over.

    PS: It really bugs me when people complain about O'Reilly "leeching" off of Open Source projects by asking $$$ for their books. If these people had written good documentation to begin with, no one would want these books!

  • As a Perl-lover, I don't find Perl to be ugly at all - alot more beautiful-looking than alot of other languages.

    As much as I enjoy using Perl to solve problems, I have to agree with Henry Spencer's description of the language: "AWK with skin cancer"

  • While I wouldn't call Perl as nice to look at as Pascal or Smalltalk, it is certainly no worse to read than C. After all -- C's the source of most of what can be called ugly in Perl -- weird operators like !=, ++, **, %, etc.
  • Pigeons, like F77 code, can be found everywhere.
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • 2 Problems:

    1. Linux programming language? Did I miss this somewhere?

    2. Perl is most certainly not, in any way shape or form, ugly. It is a beautiful language that gets things done. Amen!

    :>


    - Darchmare
    - Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
  • ...think of the blue-screens of death when describing the blue-faced mandrill for the NT book? I know I did. :)
  • Well, I like ORA's "classic" books, and I'm also a big fan of PTH as well. I've seen very little crap come off of their presses in my time.

    If it says PTH on the spine, you can pretty much assume it's going to be a good book.
  • As a Perl-lover, I don't find Perl to be ugly at all...

    Well, I love Perl as well; I write in C or C++ only when I can't do it in Perl. It is one of the best things to appear on the net. I would marry the language if I could.

    But, let's face it: as languages go, it is definitely homey. I would go so far as claiming it really is ugly. But then, who said good tools need to be beautiful...
  • Well, they didn't use the penguin for their Linux books, so they will probably not use a daemon for the BSD line... Interesting that they chose a wild west theme for Linux though -- wish they could squeeze a penguin into the covers somehow; I see Tux in a hat and poncho with a cigar in the beak sauntering up to the bar :)
  • I used to have a copy of the poster that they put out periodically with all of their books listed. They lay out all of the series sort of like a railway set-up (that is what the color refers to) with all of the animals.

    Quite pretty...

    Took it down because it was rather too effective at advertising to me...

    Ben Tilly
  • I agree with you partially on this idea. I think, though, that it would be better for them and for the readers to make a Fortran90 book rather than a FARTRAN77 book. I realize that there are relatively few good FORTRAN77 books out there, though, and that many people (myself included) need more help on 77. Thus, I think the way that they could do this would be to highlight all of the 90 specific text in a different color (like the new IBM Fortran90 Reference Manual). This way, 77 programmers could still use the book, but those who wish to move into a programming language that actually has pointers could easily begin bringing code into the modern era. That said, this is what I am trying to do at my job. I've got 22 years of legacy code the simulates planetary formation. All of the code is a mess and I am going crazy.
  • looks kinda like the Piltdown Man...
  • Bill Gates and Richard Stallman Meet in Airport; Thousands Killed in Resulting Explosion. News at 11."
    A matter-antimatter explosion?
    -GBorter

  • Ameranthropoides loysi, if I recall correctly. Originally thought to be the sole specimen of the first species of ape discovered in the Americas, now more commonly reckoned to be a Spider Monkey Of Unusual Size.

    It does spell out a possible trend in O'Reilly covers though - the use of cryptozoological animals on the cover of books for mythological products. Maybe Bigfoot on the cover of "High Availability Computing With Windows NT"...

    Al

  • I'm much more inclined to purchase a technical book after its value has been demonstrated

    I sometimes do it the old fashioned way. Go down to the book store, flip through the book, see if it covers what I care about in a depth that makes it useful.

    Also, I have to say that the reader reviews on Amazon often help when I'm trying to pick the right book.

  • There was an article in Canada's National Post recently, where they said that Michael Cowpland was using the Linux programming language to revive Corel.

    I think Beavis and Butthead say it best: "Uhhh...huhuh....some people are dumb"

    -Doviende

  • I know that O'Reilly used to sell t-shirts, and I also know that they're almost impossible to find nowadays. I wasn't cool enough back then to get my own so I would love O'Reilly to offer them again! The _sed & awk_ guys are sooo cute. Does anyone have a used O'Reilly t-shirt to sell me? :)
  • Works for me. I'd pay for a poster like that...or two or three...
  • Norton Anti-Virus will detect and kill B.O.

    You probably don't run a very large place, and given your experience, you're probably top dog. Something you might want to ponder is that, for raw file serving, RedHat5.1, loaded with Samba, has about two and a half times the file serving ability as NT4 on the same hardware.

    RH+Samba is free, a couple of dollars from the LinuxMall, or $50 from RedHat. You can use it on as many machines as you like, and not violate copyright. Service contracts can be purchased.
    Yeah, it's a pain to learn a new O.S., but since Linux is really Unix without the copyright payment, it's worth learning. Unix, being 30 years old has quite a history, and plenty of tools available. It has resurfaced, mostly due to uptimes measured in months and years, as opposed to days for NT.

    Linux is becoming the Unix standard as hardware manufactures slap their forheads and say "Why bother maintiaining our version, when we can just release the the hardware specs and Linux people will develop it for free?"

    It's pretty easy to make a user account, and then you'll get at least some respect. At least leave an e-mail address and a nickname.

    The first step to learning is to say "I don't know this."

    hanzie.
  • ..so I wonder at what point the O'Reilly folks will realize they'll sell more books when they make online versions of the books freely available on the web. While it may seem a contradiction, it is not. Personally, I'm much more inclined to purchase a technical book after its value has been demonstrated: Show me the content is truely valuable, then I'm much more likely to purchase a hardcopy for my own convienience instead of going to a website.
    I'm sick of buying books on paper altogether. And no, I'm not some wigged out environmentalist; I actually prefer online documentation because it takes up much less space than shelves of books. With some improvements in documentation software, it should also be more convenient to read and to search through.

    Yes, there are some classic computer books that I would probably keep around, but in general, I would much prefer paying for a license and an online copy, like The Evil Known As Proprietary Software. Technology changes too quickly. If the book is good enough - the heresy! - I might even be willing to pay an upgrade fee for the next edition.
  • I do have a couple O'Reilly books (Programming Perl, DNS and BIND, I think that's it), but I think their books are often superfluous. To their credit, the books are well written if a bit too fluffy for my taste, and the authors are usually experienced and well qualified for their chosen subjects.

    Info pages, man pages, source code, and the web usually provide more than enough info to spare you from buying an O'Reilly book. True, it will usually cost you time and convenience, which may be worth much more to you than the cover price.
    OTOH, I have about a dump truck full of books from Addison Wesley, John Wiley, and Prentice Hall, along with a few titles, e.g., from Digital Press and Morgan Kaufmann. IMHO, these books are much better values.
  • I already give Mr. O'Reilly a good amount of money, but if he were to make some of their covers (NOT the Oracle bugs - ick) available as a posters I'd probably have to throw more cash his way... Seriously - wouldn't your high-tech office be ever-so-much cooler with a giant Emacs beast on the wall? Or perhaps the cute DCOM doggies for the family room at home? Face it, technical stuff has already taken over everything else in our lives, why not our decorating schemes as well... paul
  • I'm curious how many ORA books most people own? I know amongst my friends when we want a book on topic "x" we naturally search for a ORA book first. Maybe this should be a poll for CmdrTaco to setup... Hint!?!

    I Currently own 9 how about the rest of you???
  • Nice job! Anyone else think that a series of O'Reilly trading cards would go down well?
  • So I wonder when O'Reilly will collect their colophons into a single volume :-) I've always found them to be an interesting read. And I wonder what would be the most suitable animal to grace the cover. A Tapeworm perhaps, as the word colophon always makes me think of colon!
  • A few weeks ago, I picked up a tiny handbook
    from ORA called 'Managing Projects with Make'
    It has a brown cover, and is actually quite
    interesting.

    A good article overall, except for the
    'shareware Linux programming language' part.
  • I found it to be a pretty interesting article, however my only objection is that they referred to Perl as "ugly but well adapted to their environment". As a Perl-lover, I don't find Perl to be ugly at all - alot more beautiful-looking than alot of other languages.. Except maybe for those entries in the Obfuscated Perl contest... :)
  • I think the first O'Reilly books on Linux pre-date the Tux logo.

    I remember Running Linux by Matt Welsh and Linux Network Administration by Olaf Kirch as two of the first Linux books.

    IIRC, the penguin showed up around the same time as the 2.0 kernel.

    Whatever happened to Matt Welsh? Back a few years ago he was pretty high profile in the Linux community, but I haven't heard anything about him in years.
  • Not an O'Reilly book but, Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel is one book that is available in electronic form [bruceeckel.com] as a text file (maybe a Word document?) or pdf. I read it online before purchasing the printed version. At least minamilistic proof that freely available text can also be sold. :-)

    Anyone know where I can get a stuffed EMAC to but beside my stuffed TUX?


    ACK!
    ...shareware programming language!
  • I really want to see an O'Reilly FORTRAN-77 book. All of the FORTRAN books out there are really old, and are relatively dry. The question is, of course, what animal whould it be? Something, ugly, but either extremely good at what it does or very wise or intelligent. I'm not sure if there is an elephant book already.

    -- A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."

  • a bit homely, kinda cryptic to deal with, but quite efficient at its task.

    on the cover should appear a hacker.

    -krog
  • Well you have to expect a mainstream article to make some sort of blunder.
    Shareware is a bad enough mistake to make - but a programming language?? Well everyone knows that linux isn't a language.

    It's a way of life!

    --

  • ... or Beanie Babies!

    Perhaps Wizards of the Coast could come up with a TCG (gain programmer mana based on the spine color of the books).
  • palpatine remarked:

    "Volumes on the shareware Windows programming language feature pictures of kamikaze warplanes and Amtrak trains, because "Windows likes to crash," O'Reilly says."

    Sigh!

    As a model railroader and railfan who also likes Linux and supports Open Source, I always feel a pang when folks take shots at the things I value. Amtrak trains DO NOT like to crash. Please point your browser at:

    http://www.oli.org/ (Operation Lifesaver - US)

    or:

    http://www.Ol-Og-canada.org/ (Operation Lifesaver - Canada)

    As for faith in USA Today, USA Today may provide road warrior fodder, but I prefer /. for stuff that matters. :-)

  • I did check out Macmillan, thanks for the URL. First thing I see is a plug for a book on ActiveX. ACK! Had to leave in a hurry.

    Am I a Microsoft bigot? No, I have many good reasons to dislike them and their really, truely crappy products.

  • Unfortunately the elephant has already been used for "MCSE: The Electives in a Nutshell," and perhaps other MCSE books. Too bad; I like elephants.

    dix
  • FWIW, O'Reilly will be publishing a free online version of _DocBook: The Definitive Guide_ by Norman Walsh and Leonard Muellner at the same time as the hard copy comes out late this spring or
    or early this summer. (DocBook is the Linux doc DTD.)

  • > Personally, I'm much more inclined to purchase a technical book after its value has been demonstrated

    Personally, I find the animal on the cover to be all the demonstration of value that I need. I've yet to run into a bad O'Reilly book.

  • I almost died laughing the first time I saw the cover of the Baboon Book... I mean, there've been so many times that I've heard people say that a trained monkey could run a network better than most MCSEs...
  • I just recently started my collection on O'Reilly books (Learning Perl, Programming Perl, and Advanced Perl Programming). I've bought other technical manuals in the past, and the primary distinction between O'Reilly and their competition is not the animal covers. :^)

    Most technical manuals are written in the style of a college professor lecturing to his class. "This is the right way to do it." they usually proclaim. The Perl books (and others I have parused) from O'Reilly are written by someone who will tell you, "Well, this is how I got this to work. Give it a try, and see if it works for you." No lecturing involved, just straightforward handy information.

    The animals, however, are a bonus. Creativity in a world usually devoid of such. I'm dreading the day, however, when some other publisher starts to publish "copycat" titles with animals gracing their covers. Eek.

  • ...so I wonder at what point the O'Reilly folks will realize they'll sell more books when they make online versions of the books freely available on the web.

    They tried this with "The Linux Network Admin Guide", and the print version did not sell well.

    TedC

  • I found it here [3com.com] if anyone's interested.
  • Perl programs strongly resemble line noise. You have to be either a masochist or brutally obsessive-compulsive to actually take the time to decipher the majority of programs written by someone else (and sometimes yourself). Perl is pretty in the same way that a mutant-child is pretty to its mother. "A face that only a mother could love" and all that.

    - d
  • I have several of the ORA books. Whenever I leave one laying around the living room, my wife always says to me, "I wish you'd stop buying those damn computer books with the cool animal covers. I always think they're about something interesting, then I read the title. You geek."
    :)

  • Information wants to be free... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Sunday April 11, 1999 @12:30PM (#1939941) Homepage
    For whatever reason that catchphrase, 'Information wants to be free' irks me. Maybe it's because everyone I know who proclaims this is annoying and a pirate, so they've lost major respect points by irritating me and flouting the socio-economic structure in existence in the US...

    An interesting concept would be for O'Reilly to provide an online documentation center, all the while having a pane atop or to the left or something with advertisements/links(same thing) to their books and works, as well as for other companies...

    IE, an information/documentation portal, with advertisements from hardware, software, internet service, and user support companies, among other things...

    I don't think their sales of hardcopy books would drop, but would actually rise as more people are exposed to their site and their works... It may be tough to sell the concept to authors, however.

    It's nice to have something free and available, but for a real reference, for example when on a slow connection, not online, or one doesn't want to spend hours staring at a monitor, or you just want to hold something in a comfortable chair...

    The online documentation would be added value/service, I think...

    AS

  • Information wants to be free... (Score:3)

    by eyepeepackets ( 33477 ) on Sunday April 11, 1999 @12:08PM (#1939942)
    ...so I wonder at what point the O'Reilly folks will realize they'll sell more books when they make online versions of the books freely available on the web. While it may seem a contradiction, it is not. Personally, I'm much more inclined to purchase a technical book after its value has been demonstrated: Show me the content is truely valuable, then I'm much more likely to purchase a hardcopy for my own convienience instead of going to a website.

    That information can be free and still provide a living for those who bundle it is the big boon of computer/internet evolution. The trick is for those who bundle information to quickly realize that traditional marketing techniques, when applied to information, are often the incorrect path to profitability. Point: Don't try to convince your customers that your product has value via arguments and gimmicks (traditional marketing), but show them the goods so they can convince themselves of the value, then provide them with convienience and service -- it this case, a quickly referenced book.

    Three cheers to O'Reilly for providing the Linux/Unix community with convienience and quality over the years: May you all prosper accordingly.



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