Buy an O’Reilly book these days, and you get a free trial subscription to Safari Bookshelf. It provides online access to a myriad of the latest books on a wide range of technical themes. And although the main benefit is the search facility, it’s not just like Amazon’s Search Inside; you also get to read the whole book. Various titles are often available in the actual print format, so you can see the book as it is printed on paper.
Recently, Safari also started offering video tutorials. The videos are provided by Lynda.com, who’ve been doing video training for 12 years (apparently, it’s one of the longest running sites on the web). As you’d expect, the tutorials are thorough and professional. If you want to learn a quick new technical skill, these videos are perfect.
Currently, the range of tutorials covers Office 2007, Microsoft Expression Suite, Ruby on Rails, HTML, Flash, etc. There are others on making better use of e-mail, blogging, and podcasting. I found about 100 current titles in total. (That should keep me going for a while.)
Safari offer the tutorials as part of a subscription service. Lynda.com provide a cheaper subscription service too, but you don’t get the extra benefit of the books for a small supplemental price.
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