O’Reilly is OK, usually

O’Reilly books treat their customers pretty well most of the time. This is maybe because their leader is still alive and actively interested in the tech industry. What’s cooler is, although lots of companies let you register a book online and it is mainly a source of datamining, O’Reilly will actually cut you a 30% discount on an upgrade to a new edition when it comes available. Too bad they don’t make old editions available online though…

That said, O’Reilly usually publishes decent books, but their quality is starting to lag these days, and unfortunately, few of their books ever come close to the quality of the Perl books and the various Unix/Linux/OS X and shell books. Some things are just plain WAY outdated, like the Ruby in a Nutshell book? That’s a langage that’s changed a lot in the last few iterations let alone the horde of them released since the book was published. (update please..)

Nothing is worse than buying a tech book only to find out it is out of date. (this is why I generally won’t buy one more than 1 year old)