A couple of links to other people’s interesting posts I’ve come across in the last few days.

Raymond Chen on “There is no law that says meetings can’t end early”. I wish more people would take this advice to heart, but that’s been on my Christ…

Plus, one other important thing, I have started to extracting the most relevant information (code samples, interesting quotes) and adding it to my wiki. Makes learning much more “sticky.” You can’t do that with printed books.

IMO, the real issue here is purely technical; get the advantages of paper but w/o the waste. I found it good enough to read most (technical) books on an old Tablet PC. For the price it offers lot more flexibility than e-ink alternatives. I have now high mobility and no noticeable additional strain on my eyes.

To me, the two biggest problems with the “dead tree” format:
* they are not searchable (a good index is helpful, but a poor substitute)
* they are not easily transported, and I don’t want to buy one copy for home and one for work, nor do I want to schlep around heavy books any more than necessary

So “yes”, but with qualifications — I supplement my printed books with Safari, PDF versions, etc.

I guess that I still buy about 20% of my book reading in paper form. The rest is consumed either on my computer (often via direct search) or (more and more often nowadays) on the iPhone while on commute.

One reason for a Safari Library subscription is that it can save you money: I guess there are 3-4 books a year that you would not read if knew what you know after reading it. Maybe even 1-2 that don’t make it beyond chapter two. With Safari, your anger is limited because, at least, you didn’t spend money directly on those books.

1. As a reference like Antonio says.

2. When I want to understand the context and basics of a technology. Free online resources are good answering at specific questions but typically don’t set the context or explain the foundations. Even Wikipedia wastes my time if I’m looking for clear context.

3. When I’m being a bonehead and missing an “obvious” solution. Free online resources like forums are great with answers to tough questions that foil most people and with workarounds for specific, hard problems, but what about before your coffee has kicked in, when you’re being thick headed? Then you need some text that will remind you of the more obvious solutions. Nobody writes up the “obvious” solutions unless someone pays them to write them up, and that material typically gets published in books only.

I still buy printed books to complement Safari, but I find that reading offline is more a psychological reason than an eyestrain reason.

Since subscribing to Safari, I find I spend less money and read more books than without Safari. The service also makes it easy for me to explore an area of interest that (at first) is not interesting enough for me to buy the book. This empowerment of exploration was a welcome surprise after subscribing to Safari.

If you want to try Safari, you can subscribe for free for 10-15 days and then get 15% off your subscription fee (just websearch to find current discounts).