A sale on O’Reilly books: 3 books for the price of 2

I’m a big fan of O’Reilly books. They are a great reference when tackling pretty much any programming topic. I own a ton of their books.

A few weeks ago I was searching for something (I can’t even remember what it was) and I stumbled across a new feature on their site. They are now selling short (around 50 pages) PDF’s called “Short Cuts” that are basically short papers on some topic that they don’t have a book for yet. Its a pretty neat idea, the PDFs range in price from around $5 to around $10 or so.

And the coolest thing is that there is a promotion going on where you “Buy 3 books for the price of 2″. With the short cuts I was hooked because there were a couple that looked interesting and the price was hard to beat. The whole process was pretty painless and within minutes I had my new PDFs.

Fast forward to today: Again I’m searching for something (RTF documentation to be exact) and a hit turns up on O’Reilly’s site. This time its for one of their pocket reference guides. I was bummed because it looked like the book had the answers I was looking for, but I knew the odds of finding it locally were low, and I didn’t feel like waiting for it to show up in the mail…

And right around then I noticed the book was available as a PDF for *half* price. It turns out that O’Reilly is now offering a lot of the pocket guides as PDFs for immediate download, and they are pretty much half the price of the dead tree book. Isn’t that awesome? the best part is the 3 for the price of 2 sale is still going on.
So, I wound up spending $10 and now I’ve got 3 more PDF of pocket guides. Go check it out if you are in the market for any of the pocket guides. Also, several of their newer books are available in PDF form also. Sadly, their older books aren’t in PDF form yet, which bummed me out because there’s a couple that look really interesting. This is the long tail at work.