I’ve been using O’Reilly’s Safari a bit lately, thanks to ACM getting into bed with them and offering something like 600 titles as part of ACM membership. This alone makes the membership worthwhile AFAIC, it’s an excellent benefit. Of course, it is only as good as the books you have access to and I wondered if the selection would be any good. It turns out that the list of available books is actually not all that bad (not excellent, but you have to expect that – pay a bit more to access the full array of titles.)

Safari its self turns out to be quite friendly to use too. The books are presented in sensibly broken up sections (as opposed to “printed page” based) and in plain text using a fairly simple layout. A contents tree and current location sits unobtrusively on the left. And you can add notes and bookmarks, which is very useful but could do with a little web-twopointohey ajaxy goodness (link->form->post->return is so passé). It’s much better than all the crap I’ve seen done in putting magazines online (i.e. IEEE Spectrum, ACM Queue.) Books are a different concept I guess, but not that different maybe the crap magazine efforts stem from a resistance to making redundant all those poor souls who manage print layouts?

Anyway, I’ve resisted trying the Safari thing given that I prefer a good old paper book when I’m not in front of the PC. Thanks to ACM I’ve been able to give it a spin and, while it’s not going to replace print tech books in my life, there’s definitely a place for it in my reading habits.

Now if only Safari Books Online had an Offline mode… and I had a nice gadget for offline reading. Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t seem so crash hot to me, the high end HTC Advantage “phone” might do, but what I’d really like to see is an ASUS Eee in a tablet form (and had longer battery life.) That said, the whole offline thing isn’t going to matter all that much soon, well, now even.