[franze]

cool story

sadly i can never order another book from them, ever after i made the mistake of ordering and actual reading "Couch DB" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596155902.do and "The Art of SEO" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596518875.do front to cover (as i do with 80% of all books i purchase)

It seems like o'reilly is no longer in the book publishing business, but in the business of collecting blogsposts, printing them on paper selling them via their outstanding brand - without any quality assurance of any kind (other than choosing still outstanding cover pics.

additionally i made the mistake of ordering "Data Source Handbook" http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018254.do via Amazon, paid my $29.99 and only realized in the moment i opened the box, that it actually has 42 pages and no real content. thanks to jeff b. i could return it to amazon.

its very sad what happened to o'reilly - there was a time you could pick-up/buy any oreilly book, read it from front to cover and then know more about the topic than 99.999% of all other humans on this planet - and you had a very good base of actually becoming a real expert on that topic, these days seem now very long ago.

[dredmorbius]

ORA was absolute go-to in the early to mid 1990s.

By the dot-com era, quality had slipped notably. There was so much new tech coming out, and so much demand for it, that random titles would come out, several of which were quite slipshod: poorly written, conterfactual, bad examples, etc.

The Beowulf clusters book was a particular low point.

I recall flipping through another via my standard algorithm: table of contents, introductory chapter, skim a few pages elsewhere, index, and I still had absolutely no idea what the technology in question.

The tagline "the last book on X you'll ever need" did stand out, though, and I can vouch for its truthfulness.

There still are good O'Reilly books out there, but they've long since been an automatic buy (and in fact little on paper, real or virtual, is any more).