Instead of having to buy Hackers and Painters, I can just read it online. At work everyone on the internet team got a subscription to Safari Tech Books Online. It is quite nice to have so many technical books at my disposal. I would have eaten this sort of thing up while in college. It’d be sweet if Calvin provided a subscription to every CS student. It’d be more worthwhile than that those silly Microsoft / MSDN subscriptions they provide. Right now I’m going through Learning Python and Hackers and Painters, though I just noticed that Linux Kernel Development was recently added to the library. That was the one other book that I wanted to browse through. Not so much because I’m interested in kernel development but more so I can better understand how Linux interacts with the hardware.
The library is great in that they have a ton of books. I think they have all or most of the O’Reilly books, which is key. However, the drawback is that the site itself is pretty horrible. It is horrible from a user interface perspective and performance wise. Every single action triggers a request to their super slow servers. Several actions require a few too many clicks which translate into waiting for their servers to respond. They should allow users to control page navigation simply by using the keyboard. They also fail to do the basics like remember what font setting I used last. Needless to say the site could use a major overhaul to bring it into the 21st century.