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Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?

By Mike Hendrickson
September 27, 2008

Is Adobe worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft.

This year has seen a glut of books on topics in that strange area occupied awkwardly by behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy. Some fail to distinguish themselves, merely rehashing the many ways in which we aren't perfectly rational creatures. Others, however, find an original angle to tack the last 30 years of work since Daniel Kahneman first thought...

Book Review: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

By Nat Torkington
July 31, 2008

Andy Hunt's Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Press; 2008) teaches programmers how to master a subject, strategies for using your brain to its fullest, systems for learning, and the best ways to practice. The result is a grab-bag of pop-psych systems, practical strategies, and good old-fashioned inspiration that will give most programmers more footholds as they climb...

Book Review: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

By Nat Torkington
July 31, 2008

Select O'Reilly Books Soon on Kindle, and as Digital Ebook Bundles

By Andrew Savikas
June 20, 2008

Update: On his New York Times blog, David Pogue has noted O'Reilly's pilot in the context of the recent discussion prompted his column on ebooks and piracy (which brought insightful responses from Adam Engst and� Mike Masnick, along with a follow up from David). Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our...

Thinking in Wikis

By Nat Torkington
June 16, 2008

I clearly remember thinking, when I ordered my copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, "this has got to be a new low for O'Reilly. How can it be anything but a waste of a ream of paper?" I mean, "Wikipedia: it's an online encyclopedia that anyone can improve". There, what else is there to say? Throw in the URL and...

What's Keeping Adobe Up at Night? Probably Not Silverlight.

By Tim O'Reilly
May 17, 2008

Roger Magoulas, our director of research, sent out the recent comment and graph as part of his weekly analysis of the latest load of our Bookscan-based data mart: What's keeping Adobe up at night? Probably not Silverlight. I noticed the Silverlight topic looking bright red [in the treemap visualization that shows week-to-week changes by topic] and thought I would...

Nice Slashdot Review of Programming Collective Intelligence

By Tim O'Reilly
April 19, 2008

Checking the Amazon bestseller list recently, I was delighted to see Toby Segaran's Programming Collective Intelligence back among the top ten computer books on Amazon's Computer and Internet bestseller list. The book made it as high as #2 or #3 when it was published last year, but it's great to see it hitting the top of the charts again....

Dan Roam's "The Back of the Napkin"

By Jimmy Guterman
March 21, 2008

I can't draw. Really. I'm a competent interaction designer, but my graphic design skills are those of a plankton. I can't draw on the right side or the left side of my brain. Yet, like everyone else in business and...

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 4 - The Languages

By Mike Hendrickson
March 7, 2008

We will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area. Overall the 2007 market for programming languages was down (1.67%) in 2007 when compared with 2006. There were 1,809,695 units sold in 2006 versus 1,779,523 units sold in 2007 which is (30,172) less units in 2007.

O'Reilly Radar, other O'Reilly efforts win JOLT awards at SD West

By Andy Oram
March 6, 2008

O'Reilly Radar, Beautiful Code, The Myths of Innovaiton, and Safari Books Online win awards at the SD West conference.

A big spike for The Big Switch

By Tim O'Reilly
March 6, 2008

We saw an amazing spike in the Bookscan sales data for Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch (a business book about the switch to utility or cloud computing) this past week. We were curious about this huge jump. We see...

State of the Computer Book Market, part 3 -- The Publishers

By Mike Hendrickson
March 3, 2008

In this third installment we will look at how Publishers fared in 2007 when compared to 2006.

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2: The Technologies

By Mike Hendrickson
February 22, 2008

Recapping the big picture from the last post, you can see that the moderate-to-high growth of Consumer Operating Systems has not been visibly aided by the addition of 47 new Q1 '07 Vista titles, because there were no Vista titles in '06 -- hence the black box for Vista. However, the whole Category Family (Consumer Operating Systems) benefits from 47 new titles with more than 86,000 Vista units sold in the first three months of this year.

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 1: The Market

By Mike Hendrickson
February 21, 2008

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 1: The Market focuses on comparing 2006 with 2007.

O'Reilly FYI Blog Great Supplement to Radar

By Tim O'Reilly
February 18, 2008

There's been a lot going on at O'Reilly recently that I haven't had time to blog about. But as it turns out that there's a great place for many of the stories that I would squeeze into Radar if...

Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide

By Tim O'Reilly
February 1, 2008

I'm jealous. The Prags have just published a book I wish I'd thought of first: Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide. I've been talking quite a bit about augmented reality lately, especially when people ask me about what I think...

Hand of Google

By Dale Dougherty
January 19, 2008

While looking at a library book scanned by Google, I found this image, the hand behind the scanner revealed....

A Year in O'Reilly Books (2007)

By Tim O'Reilly
January 8, 2008

I was looking the other day at our internal sales reports, and thought I'd offer a few random reflections based on our changing mix of bestsellers. This is anecdotal data, and for O'Reilly books only, not to be confused...

Neil Gaiman on Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"

By Tim O'Reilly
December 26, 2007

Cory Doctorow just sent out the following note: Neil Gaiman gave me an unexpected Christmas present this year -- a stellar review of my forthcoming novel Little Brother (a YA novel that pits hacker kids in San Francisco against...

OLPC and the Kindle

By Mike Hendrickson
December 21, 2007

When I saw the OLPC I just had to tinker around with it. So on an hour train ride home I explored the little OLPC and was quite impressed.

A Passion for Reading

By Dale Dougherty
December 10, 2007

Several items about books: Stephen Levy writes in his Newsweek cover story on the Kindle and Jeff Bezos: "When making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, [...] we may overlook an object that is superbly...

Shelfari and the New Social Contract

By Andrew Savikas
November 13, 2007

The high value we've come to place in reputation on the Web is underscored in several ways by the recent dustup over Shelfari. In short, Shelfari is being called out (primarily, but definitely not exclusively, by Tim Spalding, of competitor...

Beautiful Libraries of the World

By Nat Torkington
September 8, 2007

Bibliophilia is an occupational hazard in the publishing industry. I've got it, and I know Tim does. We both loved this set of photos of beautiful libraries around the world. To be allowed a day in each library would make...

Ignite Boston - Next Week

By Mike Hendrickson
August 30, 2007

There will be some short "launches," followed by lightening talks, and a couple of other ideas that we will inform you of in the coming weeks.... Another reason we wanted to announce this event this early, is so those of you who would like speak for five minutes on something cool, new, or exciting you can get into the queue sooner rather than later.