I have 3000 books on my bookshelf
I saw some “How many books do you own?” type questions on some blogs recently and IMHO, it was either using a really silly premise (your intelligence is directly proportional to the number of books you have) or was just good ole’ ego-inflation at it’s best.
In order to disprove the abovementioned premise consider the fact that I have about 3000 books and am told that I have (under?) average intelligence.
You don’t believe that I have 3000 books? Just take a look at my library.
Working where I work, I get free subscription to this wonderful resource called Safari Online . Safari Online (SO) is an online library of IT-related books from leading publishers (O’Reillys, Pearsons, SAM Publishing etc.). SO contains not only the full-text books online for your viewing pleasure but also includes a really good search tool that let’s you search for text, and more importantly, relevant pieces of code.
That’s incredibly useful because I can directly copy-paste code rather than have to type it out from a book. The only issue right now is that I have to read the books online and can’t print them out or save them as PDF (I’m guessing this is for IP reasons). Although there does seem to be a more expensive subscription where you can download and print chapters.
Subscription to Safari Online is “Enterprise-only” which means that your organization has to purchase group-wide subscription for SO. I’m not exactly sure why they’ve done that. One reason may be that if books are illegally distributed, they can hold your company liable (If that is the reason, then it’s one smart move).
Oh yes, they also have a library for Business professionals (which is a lot of handwaving if you ask me).
Here are some useful links:
Safari Online
Test Drive SO instantly
Trial Subscription to SO-Tech Books Online
Trial Subscription to SO-Business Books Online
