O'Reilly Media

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Programming Perl is a classic O'Reilly book.

O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics. They have achieved distinctive branding by featuring a woodcut of an animal on many of their book covers.

[edit] Company

The company began in 1978 as a private consulting firm doing technical writing, based in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. In 1984, it began to retain publishing rights on manuals created for Unix vendors. A few 70-page "Nutshell Handbooks" were well-received, but the focus remained on the consulting business until in 1988, when the company was practically mobbed at a conference for its preliminary Xlib manuals, an event which indicated there was an under-served audience for their kind of books.

In 1992, when there were only 200 web sites, O'Reilly Media published the first book about the web, devoting a whole chapter to it, in Ed Krol's groundbreaking Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (1992). O'Reilly Media also created the first web portal (and the first Internet site to do advertising), the Global Network Navigator, or GNN, in 1993. GNN was sold to AOL in 1995 in one of the first big transactions of the dot com boom.

In 1997, Programming Perl was one of the top 100 books in any category at Borders during all of 1996 despite a lack of mainstream computer industry recognition. O'Reilly launched a Perl Conference to raise the profile of Perl. Many of the company's other software bestsellers were also on topics that were off the radar of the commercial software industry. So in 1998, O'Reilly invited many of the leaders of these software projects to a meeting. Originally called the freeware summit, the meeting became known as the Open Source Summit because it was at this gathering that the group formally got behind a new term to tell their combined story. The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (which includes the Perl conference) is now one of O'Reilly's flagship events. Other key events include the Emerging Technology Conference and FOO Camp.

The company describes itself as "thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world," and on many topics, computer programmers consider an O'Reilly title to be the definitive book on the topic. While many think of O'Reilly in terms of their popular guides that feature an animal woodcut design on the cover, this is only one of several lines that they publish.

Besides publishing, the company hosts many annual conferences, and provides online services for the open source community. Among such conferences are O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in California and O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. Overall, O'Reilly describes its business not as publishing or conferences, but as "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators."

O'Reilly has also adopted Creative Commons's Founders Copyright, which limits the maximum term of copyright protection to 28 years; it is much shorter than the current default duration of the copyright monopoly in copyright law.

In May 2006, CMP Media, a company that helps O'Reilly Media sponsor their Web 2.0 conference, sent a cease and desist letter to a non-profit in Ireland which was organizing a conference that also had Web 2.0 in its name. Since then it was revealed that CMP Media had filed trademark applications in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere that cover the term Web 2.0 used in titles of conferences and other events. This caused a massive uproar in the blogosphere and resulted in an agreement between CMP and the Irish non-profit.^[1]

[edit] Books

[edit] Animal books

For many years the most typical O'Reilly books, the "animal books" are meant as a thorough guide to working with a given technology. The original animal design was developed by Edie Freedman because she thought that Unix program names sounded like "weird animals."

Programming Perl (known as the camel book)
Learning Perl (known as the llama book)
Running Linux (ISBN 0-596-00272-6)

There are also subdivisions within the line of "animal" books; for example, O'Reilly recently released a series of Cookbooks that provide prescriptive "recipes" for accomplishing specific tasks with a heavy emphasis on automation and scripting. Examples include the Perl Cookbook (ISBN 1-56592-243-3) and the Exchange Server Cookbook (ISBN 0-596-00717-5).

[edit] Head First

The "Head First" series stresses a reader-involving combination of puzzles, jokes, attractive layout and direct-address to immerse the reader in a given topic.

[edit] Hacks

The "Hacks" series says it "reclaims the term 'hacking' for the good guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own."

Google Hacks (ISBN 0-596-00447-8)

[edit] Internet

Ed Kroll's 1992 text, Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, was one of the first popular user guides to the Internet.

[edit] In a Nutshell

The "In a Nutshell" series offers compact reference coverage of a technology. Often, a Nutshell book will contain all the commands available for a given technology, or a complete listing of an API of some language or framework, and compress the description of the topics to a more high-level overview.

[edit] Pocket Guide and Pocket Reference

The "Pocket" series are small form factor books, typically less than a hundred pages, covering the very bare essentials of various subjects. Topics include podcasting, Linux, and several programming languages. The series aims to be portable and allow the reader to find what they are looking for quickly. They are not meant as learning aids, or as complete references.

[edit] Developer's Notebook

The "Developer's Notebook" series aims to mimic the lab notebooks of high school and college science classes, complete with scribbled marginal notes of important thoughts, points, and "gotchas". Describing itself as "all lab, no lecture", books in this series usually show specific tasks in detail, illuminating how they work, but not attempting to provide a complete overview of design, theory, and implementation of a given technology.

[edit] Missing Manual

The "Missing Manual" series, produced with David Pogue's Pogue Press, claims to be "the book that should have been in the box", providing a broad overview of the functionality of consumer technology.

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual

[edit] Cookbook

The "Cookbook" series aims to produce book that contain a general set of recipes for a particular technology. Each recipe contains a specific problem, a specific solution, and a discussion about how to apply the solution in a general sense.

[edit] Other books

O'Reilly sometimes produces books that are not in any particular series, especially when the title is of a manifesto nature.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (ISBN 1-56592-724-9) (Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow)

The company also launched a travel book series, "Traveler's Tales," and spun it out into a separate company. They also published books on health care under the "Patient-Centered Guides" brand, but this series is currently inactive.

[edit] Conferences

O'Reilly began its conference division in 1997. Today, the company offers nearly a dozen conferences:

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention
The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
The O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference
The Web 2.0 Summit (co-produced with CMP Media)
The Web 2.0 Expo (co-produced with CMP Media)
The MySQL User Conference and Expo (co-presented by MySQL AB)
Tools of Change for Publishing
RailsConf[1] (co-presented by Ruby Central)
The Where 2.0 Conference
RailsConf Europe (co-presented by Ruby Central)

[edit] Magazines

Since 2005, O'Reilly has published a quarterly magazine known as Make: technology on your time. The magazine contains articles on hardware hacking, as well as several technology-related do-it-yourself instructions for hobbyists.

In the fall of 2006, O'Reilly added a second magazine, Craft:, with the tagline "Transforming Traditional Crafts."

[edit] Former ventures

Over the years O'Reilly tried many other types of products. In 1993, they launched one of the first web-based resources, Global Network Navigator, which was later sold to AOL. Around that time, they started two short-lived book lines: one of travel books (including Travelers' Tales Mexico) and one of general business books (including Love Your Job! and Building a Successful Software Business). They produced a line of audio tapes version of the interview show Geek of the Week by Internet Talk Radio. They sold Windows based software for six years, including the first commercially available web server, Web Site.

[edit] Online resources

O'Reilly has formed a partnership with Pearson publishing, and they offer "Safari Books Online." This service makes the complete text of over 4,000 technical books available for online preview or subscription reading. It includes books from Adobe Press, Alpha Books, Cisco Press, Financial Times Prentice Hall, Microsoft Press, New Riders Publishing, O'Reilly, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall, Prentice Hall PTR, Que and Sams Publishing. The "SafariU" service lets educators compile custom textbooks from individual chapters of books in the Safari Bookshelf, and from their own uploaded materials. There is also a "Safari Affiliates" program that lets other web pages link into Safari Bookshelf books, embed Safari search results in web pages or blogs, and gives web services access to the books.

The O'Reilly Network is a collection of sites with articles, blogs, and other items of interest to developer and expert user communities. The sites include:

The company also produces dev2dev (a WebLogic-oriented site) in association with BEA, java.net (an open-source community for Java programmers) in association with Sun Microsystems and CollabNet, and O'Reilly Connection with participation from Greenplum.

[edit] Notes

^ Ivry, Sara. "Squabble Over Name Ruffles a Web Utopia", New York Times, May 29, 2006.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Official website
Safari Books Online
- Safari Affiliates
- Safari U
- Google Hacks preview online
- Running Linux preview:
  - 4th edition
  - 3rd edition
- Programming Perl preview online

Make magazine official website

[edit] Online accessible books

Open Books Project. Book collection with an open copyright
Internet Archive: Details: The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog. Open source books contributed by the community

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Category: Media companies of the United States