O’Reilly Learning platform no longer as a benefit of your ACM membership

The price from O'Reilly is 50/month or 500/year.

I think there is a lot of content there, but I'm also finding it hard to stomach their pricing. $100/year was a no brainer (or whatever the membership fee for ACM was). I would probably do $200 or maybe even $300/ year.

But $500!! Maybe I'll try talking my employer into paying for it.

Oh what a shame, I was planning to sign up for ACM next week. Unfortunately, that was a predictable move from O’Reilly. I bet most of the folks signing up for ACM were actually after O’Reilly’s contents.

I think the only cheaper alternative is during Black Friday period where they give a 100 usd discount.

A lot of employers do as well. I can’t think of a cheaper continuing education type of service that a company can provide.

If they don’t, your manager could probably get it approved with little effort.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about the value of O’Reilly Learning. On the one hand, basically all the books from major publishers. But on the other: lots of interesting, self-published books are excluded; price goes up but they’ve never added back the ability to view books in their original print layout (a feature taken away sometime in 2011-2013, I forget exactly when) so some books are particularly hard to read; and the iOS and Android native reading apps are also pretty terrible compared to reading experiences from Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, Overdrive or Scribd.

They (O’Reilly) have all this excellent book content but they don’t use it to help me understand which books I should read — what if they could pull out code samples or pull quotes, or help me read books like Manning’s, which can add audible narration to their books? What if there were more links to GitHub, or a categorization system that could group books by API version and recency/relevancy?

What if O’Reilly could meta-search and actually return ACM papers and other relevant websites alongside the relevant books and conference talks they already have? What if they indexed good content sources such as YouTube recordings, or partnered with associations for content, such as USENIX or ATD instead of just including ATD books mixed in with all the others?

Is a boring list of books really the best presentation? And why mix in book chapters so often, it’s annoying to go from a book chapter to the full book on mobile, you basically have to do another search for the book title directly.

Are there alternatives, or ways for me to access this through the library? For me, yes. But at this point in my career I find more value in materials not in O’Reilly learning’s books - I’ll learn more from a self-published title, sooner, for example.

Once upon a time, it felt like the bookstore had all the books on every topic… these days, open publishing is everywhere and the bookstore’s selection often feels limited to popular titles. Are there exceptions? Absolutely. But I’m tempted to buy those when I see them, now, if I have no other way of accessing them (e.g. Skillsoft).

Totally on a tangent here (and I realize that this may rub some people the wrong way):

Maybe just ditch O’Reilly learning altogether? The publisher stopped selling ebooks online several years ago and left people with the only option of subscribing to the online service (it does participate in the discounted Humble Bundle sales once in a while). Now these subscription prices are way higher than before. Maybe this is working out quite well for O’Reilly or maybe O’Reilly is grasping at straws (to make more money), but if an individual balks at the prices, isn’t every access a vote for the pricing and the platform, and an indirect encouragement to do away with partnerships that don’t pay “full price”?

What I’d be interested to know is what alternatives exist, even if they aren’t as broad as this one.