

50% off O'Reilly ebooks and videos today - vijayr
http://shop.oreilly.com/category/deals/cyber-monday.do

======
shortlived
Can anyone comment on the quality of O'Reilly books these days? I used to read
them long long ago but then their editing standards seemed to take a dive and
companies like Apress and pragprog started producing much better quality.

~~~
lukev
I can only speak anecdotally, not across a wide sample of books. But as an
author, O'Reilly's editing staff is _way_ better than Apress.

I haven't written for the prags but I like their books.

------
bcl
So far I haven't found a single book that I can't get from Amazon for less
than their 50% sale price (or with a $1 difference). I think they need to re-
evaluate their pricing structure.

~~~
danellis
What I dislike about Amazon, though, is that you don't get the PDF, only
"Kindle Edition".

~~~
cloverich
I think he's referring to the print books.

I buy ebooks from o'reilly; idk why anyone would purchase a technical ebook
from Amazon if they weren't forced to.

------
wiradikusuma
i cant help but wonder why on earth they're giving promotions without
preparing their infrastructure. reminds me of "free ebook from Packt" promo
that lasted for days but never managed to get any since the website was always
down.

the one that went well was Pragmatic Programmer, bought an Arduino ebook. it
was posted here last week. those who complain that book promo shouldn't be
here have their reason, but i'm glad i see this kind of promo in HN.

~~~
nicholassmith
I missed the PragProg one, slightly disappointed now I've found out about it.

The free ebook from Packt was a slight disaster, hopefully they're getting on
top of it now.

~~~
telemachos
So far as I know, the PragProg discount is still valid[1]. I think it's valid
all day today. Load up your cart, and as you go through the purchasing
process, there's a button to apply coupons. Click there, and enter the word
TURKEY (not sure if it's case sensitive; all caps works for me). That should
get you a 40% discount. Enjoy.

[1] Yup, just confirmed. Here's the original blog post, which I'll submit to
HN as well: [http://pragprog.com/news/black-friday-cyber-monday-40-off-
sa...](http://pragprog.com/news/black-friday-cyber-monday-40-off-sale).

~~~
nicholassmith
Oh, awesome thanks. Got myself confused on the expiry time.

------
rplnt
> Our site is temporarily unavailable due to routine maintenance.

Isn't it weird to do a maintenance during a sale?

~~~
jgrahamc
I suspect they don't mean that. I'll wager that's a default message and that,
in fact, their site is overloaded.

------
mrmincent
I'm fairly certain that if you create an account with o'reilly, you get a 'buy
one get one free' code for their ebooks, so with two books it basically works
out to be 50% off anyway, any day of the year.

~~~
iaskwhy
I'm getting 60% off today, not sure why. Also, one could wish to buy just one
book and would still get a good discount today on that one instead of paying
the full price for one and having another as an offer.

~~~
mrmincent
You get 60% off on orders over $100, so you've probably stocked up on ebooks
:)

~~~
Gmo
I know I did :)

Bought 6 ebooks, and I'm happy it was posted and upvoted on HN, otherwise, I
would have missed it.

------
mhurron
I could use a good book on learning Javascript. Anyone have any
recommendations?

Background: I'm not a programmer, I just do some things in my spare time. I
did a little something with Django and Bootstrap over the weekend, but I could
really only use Bootstrap for the CSS to make it look good without knowing how
the Javascript end works. So I'm not completely new to programming though
still really a beginner but would be completely new to Javascript.

~~~
cfqycwz
Eloquent Javascript seems to be pretty highly recommended. You can buy it from
O'Reilly, but the author also offers it for free online[0].

0: <http://eloquentjavascript.net/>

~~~
abecedarius
(The pay version is newer. I haven't read it, can't comment on the
differences.)

~~~
stephenhuey
Is it? The last modified date on the free web version seems to be October 30,
2012. That's less than a month ago, whereas the print version on Amazon was
published in February 2011.

~~~
abecedarius
eloquentjavascript.net says "I have published a revised version of the book on
paper. The structure of this version remained largely the same, but the whole
text has been thoroughly edited and updated."

------
belorn
The DRM-free is nice, and they get some large amount of points for doing so.

But ads in hacker news, masquerading as an article? Can we keep commercials
out please?

(interesting to see that people are not contesting that the link/title is an
actually an ad, but that people are arguing that ads should exist because they
are useful. The role and appropriateness of ads alongside other content looks
to be a controversial subject.)

~~~
melling
Who thought it was an article? Some sort of O'Reilly coupon gets posted a
couple times a year. In fact, deeply discounted tech books from most
publishers are welcome.

What you're suppose to do here is recommend great books on the list.

~~~
belorn
Are you saying that the goal of hacker _news_ is to post commercial ads with
coupons for people to see? Really? that's the goal of this site?

I wouldn't mind an article which talked about different books and in that
context, which just happened to mentioned that there was a sale going on with
50% off. That would give room of discussion. But this is just a text banner ad
with a open comment field. If it had been a real banner, positioned at the
right side of the screen, I would not complain as it would be clear that its
an ad and not ordinary content. I would even consider a small disclaimer tag
in the title ([hacker news commercial] to be fair, but to actually be listed
as any other news article?

~~~
DanBC
> Are you saying that the goal of hacker news is to post commercial ads

Are you suggesting that O'Reilly paid to have this link posted to HN? That's
not correct. They didn't. Someone saw the offer, knew that many people on HN
would find it useful, and posted it.

It's valid to not like it, and to ignore it or flag it, but don't dislike it
for something that didn't happen.

~~~
belorn
I dont think they paied for it, and I dont dislike O'Reilly. They didnt do
anything here beyond having a sale and selling non-drm products. Like I
initially said, they get major points for this.

I only pointed out that this is an ad promoting a sale. No one seams to
contest that. What people seems to have an issue with is the claim that ads
should not sit alongside other articles.

It would be interesting to hear why having a ad promoting a sale posted in a
news aggregate is a good thing, or why in this case we should have an
exception that sites like amazon or newsegg does not deserve. After all, they
too have done 1 day's sales, some very interesting for hackers. Thus, I am
failing to find an attribute that this ad differ from all other ads. Does
anyone has an insight to what that attribute is?

~~~
chris_wot
_What to Submit_

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

------
danso
FYI, _every_ day at O'Reilly is 50 percent off ebooks. If you're a logged in
member, one of the perpetual in house ads will be for a code for "Buy 1 ebook,
get 1 free"

Also FYI, the most recent purchase I made was a book that made HN's front page
last week: interactive Data Vizualization for the Web. And I highly recommend
it

<http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026938.do>

~~~
pdelgallego
Thanks for the recomendation, I just bought the book. I am trying to learm
more about visualizations (and D3). Any other recomendation?

~~~
danso
The cupboard seems dry in terms of D3 right now. But there seem to be quite a
few good books with R. The ggplot2 book is great, but I don't think it's on
O'Reilly [http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Analysis-
eboo...](http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Analysis-
ebook/dp/B0041KLFRW/ref=kinw_dp_ke)

------
lukeholder
website is slow as molasses. Cant even buy a book!

~~~
willhsiung
Apress.com has a $15 eBook special on all Apress and Springer eBooks today
only and they were already very slow at midnight Eastern Standard Time when it
started!

