Wednesday, September 15, 2010

$9.99 O'Reilly Cookbooks (EBooks) Today Only

Today's (what's left of it) O'Reilly Choose Your Own Cookbook "Ebook Deal of the Day" offers any electronic format of O'Reilly Cookbook for $9.99 each.  The page advertises: "O'Reilly ebooks are DRM-free. You get free lifetime access, five file formats, free updates."  There are over fifty titles featured including Java Cookbook, Python Cookbook, Flex 4 Cookbook, Regular Expressions Cookbook, Windows PowerShell Cookbook, SQL Cookbook, RESTful Web Services Cookbook, jQuery Cookbook, Java SOA Cookbook, MySQL Cookbook, and JRuby Cookbook.

I have really enjoyed the several O'Reilly Cookbooks that I have.  The practical layout of these books can be advantageous, especially after I'm past the introductory stage of using and learning something new.  I have been part of multiple funny conversations where non-developers have asked me what kind of "cookbook" it is that I'm reading.

Electronic books have numerous advantages that include easier searching that can more than make up for poor indexes and the ability to carry many books at a time nearly anywhere.  It is also nice to be able to download them immediately.  These O'Reilly ebooks include color images and support copy and paste.  All that being said, it still is difficult for me to pay the same or nearly the same price for an electronic book as I pay for a large heavy printed tome.  But at $9.99 each, the electronic editions of these books have another advantage to offer me.

This deal is advertised for September 15, 2010, only.  I purchased four of these e-book Cookbooks and paid $39.96 US (roughly the price of a typical single printed development book).  The list price for these four e-books totaled over $140 US.  For that $9.99 per book, I have already downloaded PDF versions of each for my laptop and ePub versions for my Droid (using Aldiko for Android).

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