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Four places to find great online deals for computer e-books
For programmers and other nerds, reading computer books is kind of like eating your greens: it's often no fun, but it is important.
If you code for a living, you may already have a corporate subscription to Safari Books Online. But even with the incredible selection you can find on Safari Books, it's not always convenient to have to be online while reading. Granted, you can download some of the books, but downloading requires "tokens" – it's not exactly free.
So for the rest of us who don't have an unlimited Safari Books subscription or who like to read offline every now and then, here are four excellent places for daily deals on computer e-books:
- Apress.com Daily Deal – Apress offers a single computer book for $10 every day. Each deal is valid for 24 hours, and the $10 price is an incredible discount. For example, as I write this, they're offering Pro .NET 4 Parallel Programming in C# for $10. The MSRP for that book is $59.99 – so that's a $50 discount. That's not too shabby! (By the time this post is published, this deal might have expired. It's just an example, though – there's a new book every day.)
- InformIT $9.99 eBook Deal of the Day – This is similar to Apress, but it offers different books. You can get a single book for $10, and it changes daily. Today's offering is Presentation Patterns, which apparently isn't out in dead-tree form yet. So you get a great price and early availability.
- Que Publishing – You'll find much the same deal here: one book per day, $10 per book. Today's offering is Microsoft Windows 7 In Depth, which was published in August 2009.
- O'Reilly's One Day Only – Of course, O'Reilly offers a similar service of its own, and it's excellent. In fact, it's the only one out of the four listed options that has an RSS feed! O'Reilly features all sorts of daily deals, not just "one book for $10." Today, the offer is for 8 Microsoft-related books, each for 50% off, in celebration of Microsoft's PDC10.
Do you know of any other great sources for cheap, legit computer e-books? Let me know in the comments!
Comments
3
Subscribe to commentsDarakNov 4th 2010 5:23PM
If you live in a college town, checking unofficial bookstores can prove fruitful. The BookHolders store in Blacksburg, for example, sells a wide array of books for $1, some of which are computing manuals. Often these books aren't the most up to date, but if you're looking for a guide to get started in a new language for example, most of the content is still very relevant.
topsy77Nov 5th 2010 2:57AM
10 bucks for an e-book? That's still insane.
Wake me up when they're < $1, DRM-free and available in any format.
Jim AndersonNov 5th 2010 2:36PM
Thanks. I love Safari, but wasn't aware of all the "book of the day" discounts available from publishers. Another good resource is Books24x7. And if you are a member of ACM (about $100 USD / year), membership includes access to Books24x7 and Safari.
I really like the digital libraries, because I can search multiple books for a topic and read the relevant sections from each one. The ability to mark, annotate, and tag content is nice too.