Safari Books Online
As a consultant, I am constantly called on to reach out and expand my technical horizons and I try to keep up on the technology treadmill. As a result, I am a voracious reader, picking up books on whatever I am interested in learning at moment. I have boxes of books on everything from assembly language to Perl to advanced C++ stored in two states.
Well, not any more.
Earlier this month, I purchased a corporate (tax deductible) all-you-can-eat library subscription of Safari O'Reilly Online. For one modest per-seat subscription fee, I get searchable access to electronic copies of technical books published by O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, Sams, Prentice Hall, Que, Cisco, Microsoft, Peachpit, John Wiley & Sons, and more.
Although I generally shy away from leases or subscriptions, a quick check at my amazon purchases showed me that I would be better off purchasing a subscription (Amazon Prime is $79 per year alone). And I'm glad I did. It has turned out to be one of the most useful purchases I have made this year.
As an added benefit, I will no longer have to deal with the added headache of generating expense reports because I used a personal credit card to purchase a technical book, or the reconciling the transactions on a credit statement, or figuring out where to put the book when I am done with it.
For example, this month a client handed down an edict that all script development (build scripts, testing scripts, etc.,) must be in Python because of cross platform compatibility issues. No problem, except I needed to write a test application that would query a remote web service, parse XML, and test for expected and exceptional data. Normally, I would have coded up a quick and dirty application that leveraged C/C++ and libcurl, or Perl.
However, the client wanted to be able to run the test code under windows and Linux without compiling various libraries -- only Python. As a result, I need to quickly learn just enough Python to be dangerous. Within minutes I was reading through various Python books and was able to quickly cobble together a simple application to do what I needed.
Further, I was able to search into Python Cookbook
Within the scope of a few hours I had wrapped up the task.
Free would have been better
Some libraries (such as San Francisco Library) offer Safari Online access for free. Most of these offer a web interface (library card required) that you can connect to via the Internet. Unfortunately, I don't reside in an area that has a library with a subscription.
Labels: Consulting
