The Lair of the Pythia

I spent a bit of time today looking more closely at the offerings from Safari and ACM.

ACM membership is $99/year (less for students), with an extra $99 for access to their library of journal articles. Once you are a member you get a lot of online books for free, but nowhere near as many as Safari has. Also the books on ACM look a little out of date.

Safari, in contrast, is bang up to date, at least as far as O’Reilly books goes. You won’t find any books on Ruby at ACM. Safari has several.

Right now I’m thinking that, rather than competing, the two may be complementary. ACM membership has other benefits, and the main thing I’m likely to want for them is the journal archive. Safari has a lot more books, though I doubt that I’ll have time to read more than 10 a month so I can probably get away with the cheaper ($20/month) membership level.

So there I was, following links through from other people’s Delphi blogs, and I found myself reading Mike Pence. His piece about Delphi PHP wasn’t very illuminating, but looking at his blog I found a recent post about O’Reilly’s Safari service. Thousands of computing books online, freely readable for a modest monthly subscription? That has to be worth a try. Like Mike says, the endless stream of huge books with matching price tags is a real pain. Safari might just be the way around that.

And for those of you who won’t click through without further information, a cursory glance suggests that the price is $40/month for unlimited access and $20/month if you are happy to be limited to 10 titles each month. And no, it isn’t only O’Reilly books that are offered.

Oh, and there are Delphi books, but no Marco.

Various people have been commenting that Delphi is 12 years old today. Marco has the best post, combining it with a sneak preview of BDS 2007. The Vista stuff looks pretty. I guess I wouldn’t mind having a Vista system for development, as long as it was never connected to the Internet.

Also on Nick’s recent post is an announcement about some new hotfix patches for BDS2006. It would be nice when people make these announcements if they made clear whether they apply to the Turbos or not. I expect that they probably do as it does seem to be pretty much the same code, but it is always nice to be reassured that you won’t wreck your existing installation before adding an upgrade.

Update: Ah, good, it does apply to the Turbos. Thank you, Liz!