Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell
Summary: tech-business-idea cocktail 4 your mind
Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell is a mixture of Tim’s writings that you can find at Tim O’Reilly’s “blog” – http://tim.oreilly.com. Inside the PDF you will find the picks that are really interesting among huge selection of his articles.
Book is divided into three parts, each treats different aspects of doing business: technology, publishing, business and life. These different points of view are not meaningless. Technology is a part of our lives today. We can’t work without it. Without technology, we can’t create efficient results fast, we can’t even “think” without it. In fact, if we assume that distributed cognition is a valid thesis, we can say that today’s technology can be treated as part of our minds. When it comes to the publishing, you can find here some thoughts regarding Open Source related issues, DRM related topics – in general, how to deal with the problem of ownership of the ideas. Section devoted to business and life is the weakest one but still it contains one, very interesting article – “Books That Have Shaped My Thinking”. It is worth do get this book for the article itself. Another thing is, that going over the book you can find information you were not aware of. For example, that there is Open Books project at O’Reilly (http://oreilly.com/openbook/).
When it comes to my personal feelings regarding the book, I can say from my personal perspective only. I am Open Source developer, philosopher, and person devoted to Linux/Mac OS X. What I can tell about pics for the book is that they might be interesting for geeks as well as for people who are interested what’s behind the mind who created O’Reilly Media. Reading some articles within the book, I can tell that I fell like at home. I have become Mac addict recently (after more than eleven years of working with Linux only), I prefer Open Source over closed one (I make a living through Open Sourced projects), I prefer DRM free music over protected one and I don’t like to type in password or to have my PDF files watermarked after I had bought them. This is why, I think, book fits me.
In general, this is interesting book. Even though only first two parts caught my attention to the maximum I still think it is worth looking at. A real advantage is that you can get it for free! Free as in free beer! So, basically saying, you don’t risk a thing. If you find this book unsuitable for you, simply put it somewhere at your “PDF shelf”. If your attitude is similar to Tim’s, I am pretty sure this book will stand somewhere between books that have shaped your mind.
Product page: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449304850/