I must admit, I’m a book freak. I read a lot of technical books, just for fun. In early days, when I was in California, it was easy to find a good place with lots of new technical books and with good coffee. Now, being in Germany, I mostly rely on online resources.

So while I do enjoy reading paper books, I tend to use online libraries more and more. I’m aware of the following two online libraries:

• Safari Library
• Books24×7

Basically, hundreds and hundreds of technical books are present in both libraries, and with good share of new, recent books. It seems that Safari Library has more extensive book collection, with, naturally, most of O’Reilly titles. But Books24×7 also has lots of books that are not present in Safari. So, the libraries complement each other nicely.

In Safari Library, there’s also a “Rough Cuts” section, with preliminary versions of books that are not yet in stores! For both libraries, there are RSS feeds provided, with the latest book arrivals, so it’s easy to be up-to-date.

But I guess, the most valuable service I get from online libraries is the search. Just think of it, fully indexed content of ALL available in the library books! Now, any time I have a need to refresh my knowledge on any specific topic, I directly go to these two resources and search there. Most of the time, there are quite few books on the topic. And the quality of the info in the books is generally much higher then in the typical online resources.

Naturally, the service is not free, and it definitely helps to have a corporate account in these libraries! But even before my company provided such account, I was a happy paying customer of Safari Library - the basic subscription plan doesn’t cost much.

If I had to select only one library, I’d go with Safari. It has better user interface, better books, more intelligent search, ability to download book chapters in PDF format.

And if I had to select only one book, I’d really recommend “Code Complete” by Steve McConnell. Take a look, this book radically changed the way I look at my code.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 3:09 am and is filed under Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.