Important: O’Reilly stopped their partnership with ACM. The below tip does not work anymore.
As software developers, we constantly need to learn new technology.
Luckily, there are tons of resources to gain knowledge from.
One of them are the O’Reilly books. O’Reilly is one of the main publishers for programming books.
O’Reilly offers an online learning platform with top-notch quality. You gain access to all the titles from the O’Reilly library, as well as books from other well-known book sellers like Manning, The Pragmatic Bookshelf and Packt Publishing.
45K+ titles including early release books, 30K+ hours of video, live online courses, case studies, expert playlists, and more.
Pricing
O’Reilly is a premium subscription service and costs USD $49/month or USD $499/year for a single user.
That sounds a lot. But you get a lot of great quality content for that price.
I found an article from 2019 that stated that O’Reilly’s invidividual tier is underpriced.
Other Ways to Get Access
Some public libraries (in the US) provide free access to the platform. I haven’t found libaries that offer this perk in my region. This option is limited to where you live, and it might be US-only.
If you are a student, you should also check if your university gives you free access to O’Reilly.
A third option is the Association for Computing Machinery.
From Wikipedia 1:
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947, and is the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, claiming nearly 100,000 student and professional members as of 2019. Its headquarters are in New York City.
ACM offers multiple membership tiers. The Professional membership includes access to the O’Reilly learning platform.
The Professional ACM Library Membership costs USD $99, which is less than a quarter of the O’Reilly pricing.
They give you access to a custom collection of titles (40k+ titles out of 45k), so it’s not a 1-to-1 comparison. I cannot say which titles are missing, but with over 40,000 resources, there hopefully should be enough fodder for learning.
Plus, they offer a discounted price for people from developing countries.