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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). |