[cjensen]

Professional organizations provide access to health and other insurance plans. ACM for CompSci. IEEE for Electrical Engineers. I recommend ACM for you.

ACM also comes with free access to Safari Books Online which gives me electronic access to 95% of all professional books I'm interested in.

[abecedarius]

I was a member of both, years ago, but both had recently dropped the health insurance when I joined. (They still offered other kinds of insurance which I didn’t care about.) Has that changed?

[Nullabillity]

> ACM also comes with free access to Safari Books Online which gives me electronic access to 95% of all professional books I'm interested in.

That's probably my only real gripe with unions. I want the benefits and collective bargaining (of course), and I like the courses they occasionally hold, but I have no desire to effectively donate money to parasites like O'Reilly.

Thankfully my local union (Sveriges Ingenjörer -- Sweden's Engineers) doesn't have the O'Reilly agreement, but I'm still stuck paying for crap such as https://www.nyteknik.se/.

[Bluestrike2]

O'Reilly?

[Nullabillity]

Owns Safari, publishes a bunch of mediocre programming books.