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O'Reilly Media

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O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates, IPA /ə'raɪli/) is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly, primarily focusing on books related to computer programming. They have achieved distinctive branding by featuring a woodcut of an animal on many of their covers.

Company

The company began in 1978 as a private consulting firm doing technical writing, based in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. In 1984, it began to retain publishing rights on manuals created for Unix vendors. A few 70-page "Nutshell Handbooks" were well-received, but the focus remained on the consulting business until in 1988, when the company was practically mobbed at a conference for its preliminary Xlib manuals, an event which indicated there was an under-served audience for their kind of books.

The company describes itself as "thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world," and on many topics, computer programmers consider an O'Reilly title to be the definitive book on the topic. While many think of O'Reilly in terms of their popular guides that feature an animal woodcut design on the cover, this is only one of several lines that they publish.

Besides publishing, the company hosts many annual conferences, and provides online services for the open source community. Among such conferences are O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in California and O'Reilly Open Source Convention (August 1-5 2005) in Portland, Oregon.

O'Reilly has also adopted Creative Commons's Founders Copyright, which limits the maximum term of copyright protection to 28 years; it is much shorter than the current default duration of the copyright monopoly in copyright law.

Books

Animal books are the most typical form of an O'Reilly books. This type of book is usually meant as a basic but thorough guide to working with a given technology.

There are also subdivisions within the line of "animal" books; for example, O'Reilly recently released a series of Cookbooks that provide prescriptive "recipes" for accomplishing specific tasks with a heavy emphasis on automation and scripting. Examples include the Perl Cookbook (ISBN 1-56592-243-3) and the Exchange Server Cookbook (ISBN 0-596-00717-5).

The "Head First" series stresses a reader-involving combination of puzzles, jokes, attractive layout and direct-address to immerse the reader in a given topic.

The "Hacks" series says it "reclaims the term 'hacking' for the good guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own."

The "In A Nutshell" series offers a more compact but more complete coverage of a technology than an Animal Book. Often, a Nutshell book will contain all the commands available for a given technology, or a complete listing of an API of some language or framework, and compress the description of the topics to a more high-level overview.

The "Developer's Notebook" series aims to mimic the lab notebooks of high school and college science classes, complete with scribbled marginal notes of important thoughts, points, and "gotchas". Describing itself as "all lab, no lecture", books in this series usually show specific tasks in detail, illuminating how they work, but not attempting to provide a complete overview of design, theory, and implementation of a given technology.

The "Missing Manual" series, produced with David Pogue's Pogue Press, claims to be "the manual that should have been in the box", providing a broad overview of the functionality of consumer technology.

O'Reilly sometimes produces books that are not in any particular series, especially when the title is of a manifesto nature.

The company also launched a travel book series, "Traveler's Tales," and spun it out into a separate company. They also published books on health care under the "Patient-Centered Guides" brand, but this series is currently inactive.

Magazines

Since 2005, O'Reilly has published a quarterly magazine known as Make: technology on your time. The magazine contains articles on hardware hacking, as well as several technology-related do-it-yourself instructions for hobbyists.

Online resources

O'Reilly's "Safari Bookshelf" makes the complete text of over 1,000 technical books available for online preview or subscription reading. It includes books from Adobe Press, Alpha Books, Cisco Press, Financial Times Prentice Hall, Microsoft Press, New Riders Publishing, O'Reilly, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall, Prentice Hall PTR, Que and Sams Publishing. The "Safari U" service lets educators compile custom textbooks from individual chapters of books in the Safari Bookshelf, and from their own uploaded materials. There is also a "Safari Affiliates" program that lets other web pages link into Safari Bookshelf books, embed Safari search results in web pages or blogs, and gives web services access to the books.

The O'Reilly Network is a collection of sites with articles, blogs, and other items of interest to developer and expert user communities. The sites are:

The company also produces dev2dev (a WebLogic-oriented site) in association with BEA, java.net (an open-source community for Java programmers) in association with Sun Microsystems and CollabNet, and O'Reilly Connection with participation from Greenplum.

See also

Online Accessible Books

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