Saw today that O’Reilly now also has beta books. Thats a new concept introduced last years by the Programatic Programmers. They will provide you with a preview of upcoming books. This is especially great for technologies where there isn’t a good selection of existing books yet, as was the case with the first beta book Agile Web Development with Rails.
O’Reilly’s series is called Rough Cuts and currently includes:
They also provide PDF versions of those books. So maybe O'Reilly will introduce PDF versions of all books. That would be really great because PDF books is the other thing I really love about The Pragmatic Programmers.
David Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmers talked about imitation on his blog a few days ago:
And it’s no surprise that other publishers do what the car companies did to Toyota. They try to copy. Just this month I’ve heard of two publishers who’ll be running beta-book programs (even, somewhat lamely, calling them Beta Books). And I just heard that a well-known technical publisher might be launching a series of cheap, PDF-only, books. (Perhaps they’ll call them Thursdays to show some originality.)
Probably one of the two publishers was O'Reilly with their Rough Cuts program. Wonder who will be the other one. And I was not talking about cheap and short PDF-only books above but about the real books like for example the Rails book (which I own only on PDF).