Brief Recommendation

Excellent. 5 owls (of 5). If you are into computer-related books, try it out. You can identify books of interest to you and read them on-line, which is convenient and saves money. And you can do searches on the whole library of well over 1000 books.

Categories

• Applied Sciences
• Artificial Intelligence
• Business
• Certification
• Computer Science
• Databases
• Desktop Applications
• Desktop Publishing
• E-Commerce
• Enterprise Computing
• Graphics
• Hardware
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Internet/Online
• IT Management
• Markup Languages
• Multimedia
• Networking
• Operating Systems
• Programming
• Software Engineering

Notes:

• This is the list of categories for browsing on Safari.
• I took this list directly off the site 2003-02-26.

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Contents

• What is Safari?
• About the Reviewer
• Limitations of this Review
• The Scope of the Offering
• Major Uses of Safari (by me)
• Some Specific Features
• Recommendation

What is Safari?

With Safari, you have access to over 1000 computer related books. This section describes Safari as I understand it, based on reading about it (especially in the Safari help) and based on using it intensely for 9 days.

What do I mean when I say computer related books? Well, that includes really obvious books that deal directly with computer hardware and software technology such as:

• "PC Hardware in a Nutshell"
• "Understanding the Linux Kernel"
• "Practical C++"

• "Internet Entrepreneurs"
• "The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source"

which may be highly relevant to people in the computer field, even though they don't deal with hardware or software technology directly.

With Safari, you can easily find books that interest you and you can then read them on-line.

You can determine what books interest you by previewing them, reading a brief description of them, looking at the table of contents, looking at the index and searching them. In some cases, you can also read media and user reviews. Preview in this context means read a few of paragraphs of any section you wish. But, if you want to be able to read all of a book, you have to put it on your virtual bookshelf.

You have a certain number of slots on your bookshelf for books you wish to read. (Usually a book takes up just one slot on your bookshelf.) You fill the slots on your bookshelf based on your interests and on what you learn from searches, previews, etc. Then you can read the books on your bookshelf at your leisure. While you are reading, you can add notes and you can add bookmarks. After a book has been on your bookshelf for a month, you can replace it with another book, if you wish.

There are various features that make all this easier for you. For example:

• an on-line help capability
• bookmarks
• categories

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About The Reviewer

I own many O'Reilly books, especially Perl books. Before using the full Safari capability, I had used the Safari search tool a lot on individual books.

My subscription gave me a 10 slot bookshelf. I started using my subscription on February 18, 2003.

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Limitations of this Review

Some limitations of this review that I'm aware of are:

• My focus was on two categories: Programming and Markup. Your focus will likely be different. That being said, I did make a point of spending some time looking at various other categories
• I already was a bit familiar with the search capability of Safari.
• I had a 10 slot bookshelf. If yours is a different size, that could matter.
• I have no experience with the process of upgrading to a larger bookshelf (which you can do at a price), as 10 slots was plenty for me.
• I didn't make much use of the capability to focus a search on the books on one's bookshelf (and no others).
• I think of Safari as primarily a way to identify books I want to read and as a way to then read them. There are other more subtle uses for Safari.

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The Scope of the Offering

The scope of the offering is impressive. When I started there were 1205 books available. (Nine days later, there were 1251.) And not just O'Reilly books. In fact when I checked a bit more than 3/4ths of the books were not published by O'Reilly. Without thinking about it, I had assumed that only O'Reilly books would be included. I was most pleased that I was mistaken.

In the area of Perl which particularly interest me, the percentage of O'Reilly books was much higher. When I checked approximately two thirds were O'Reilly books (21 of 32). But this is, in my opinion, appropriate since most (though certainly not all) of the best Perl books I'm aware of were published by O'Reilly.

I went through my computer related books, and found that the majority of them were from O'Reilly. However, 5 other publishers have contributed at least one important book to my collection. 4 of those publishers are represented on Safari.

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Major Uses of Safari (by me)

I used Safari primarily for two purposes: (1) to identify books I wanted to read (2) to read books on-line, once I had decided I wanted to read them.

examples of identifying a book of interest: (a) Looking at all the books of a category that interested me, I saw a book with a title that was very appealing to me. However, looking at the table of contents made it clear the book was focused in a way that made it of little interest to me. (b) I did a search on "free software" since that was of interest to me. The book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" came up #1 on my search. I had already been considering reading it, so I took a look at the contents and previewed some sections of the book. Based mostly on reading the contents, I decided I wanted to read and review this book.

example of reading a book on line: Above I described how I decided I wanted to read and review "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution". Having decided I wanted to do that, I put the book on my virtual bookshelf. Then, over a number of sessions, I read the book on-line. I used a virtual bookmark to keep my place between sessions. During the reviewing stage, I did a number of searches to find passages on particular subjects or just to find specific passages I wished to reread.

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Some Specific Features

Safari is rich in features. Some of these features are essential to using Safari at all. Others make Safari more convenient. In this section, Ill tell you briefly my experience with a number of these features.

Browser Support: My understanding is that a wide variety of browsers are supported. I had some minor problems using Mozilla on a Linux system, so I used Konqueror instead, which worked out well.

Categories: Safari provides a hierarchy of (overlapping) categories which books belong to. When I checked there were 21 top level categories and 318 second level categories. (See Categories in the left column.) In many cases, there were even third level categories.

As an example, the top level category Programming contained 383 books in 38 subcategories. The subcategory Perl is of particular interest to me. It contained 32 books in 7 sub-subcategories. I found it quite interesting to look through the full list of 32 Perl books. When I encountered a book I thought I might wish to read, I could easily pull up the description of the book, the table of contents and any other information the publisher made available.

If you like using directory structures such as Yahoo provides, you'll likely find this feature quite familiar and useful.

Help: The help capability provided useful perspective and some specific information I found useful. In particular, the information about the search capability was helpful.

Login: It's very easy to login. You just enter your username and password.

Logout: There is a way to Logout explicitly. (That is, by clicking on "Logout", duh.) I found this reassuring, although I don't know whether it's important to use it.

My Bookmarks: You can keep your place in various books using Bookmarks. These are easy to add and easy to use to find your place. You can also delete bookmarks. When reading a physical book, I sometimes use a physical bookmark which I move from time to time as I read the book. Using Safari, I found myself getting the effect of moving a bookmark by adding a new bookmark and deleting the old one. I'm guessing there is better way, but am not sure what it is.

My Bookshelf: Each user is given a bookshelf with some number of slots. The number of slots in the bookshelf depends on your subscription. Most books (all that I was interested in) take up one slot. If a book is on your bookshelf, you can read all of it; whereas, if it is not on your bookshelf, you can only preview it.

My Notes: You can add notes on sections of books you are reading. You can also delete them. As far as I know, you can't edit them.

Since I generally prefer to keep my notes in one place and on my own machine, what I actually did was open a separate window for taking notes. That's what I did for writing this review and for writing a review of Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. It worked well for me.

My Recent Pages: A list is maintained for you of pages you've been to recently. This is nice, but not all that necessary for me.

My Recent Searches: A list of recent searches is maintained for you. I found this somewhat interesting. However, I don't recall any instance where I actually used the list for any practical purpose.

New This Week: This lists the most recent additions. Or more accurately it lists all the books on Safari in order by the date they were added to Safari with the most recently added on top.

This is kind of interesting. Note, however, that the date added to Safari and the date published may be significantly different.

Previewing: If a book is not on your bookshelf, you can still do searches on it. And you can

• read a brief description of it
• look through the table of contents and the index

• read media and reader reviews

You can also preview sections of the book. By preview is meant read a few paragraphs of any section you wish.

In practice, for me, the description and table of contents were always sufficient for making a decision. However, I do like being able to preview. This allows me to checkout the writing style, among other things.

Search: The search capability worked well and I was able to find things using it. I made some good use of the advanced search capability.

There were two minor things I would have liked that were not present. I would have liked a clear button for clearing the current search. I also would have liked a help button in the immediate vicinity of the Search.

Top 5 Books: The Top 5 Books list included many more than 5. I thought that was a good thing.

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Recommendation

Assuming you are interested in the type of computer related books being offered and have a bit of cash you are ready to spend on such books, Safari is worth considering seriously. You could well save a considerable amount of time and money. In addition to saving time and money, you may well find sources of information that you would otherwise have missed.

You can try out Safari for free. I suggest you do that, again, if you are interested in computer related books. (If you've read this far, presumably you are.)

Of course, if your way of learning depends heavily on having a physical book in your hand and making marks in them with your favorite pen or pencil, Safari may not be for you. But even then you might want to consider using Safari as a way of identifying books that you want to buy physical copies of.

The idea behind Safari is a very good one and the implementation is quite sound. Still, as I've indicated above, it may not be for everyone.

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