Regular Expressions Cookbook on Safari Books Online
If you have a Safari Books Online subscription, you can start reading Regular Expressions Cookbook on Safari Books Online right now. If you don’t, you can still click that link and then click the red free trial button in the upper right corner of the web page.
When Regular Expressions Cookbook was published as a printed book in June, it was immediately available on Safari in “print fidelity view”. This view loads one page from the printed book at a time as an image. I don’t find that view very useful for technical books. It requires too many clicks and downloads too slow to read comfortably. That’s why I didn’t blog about the Safari edition before.
Safari Books Online now shows Regular Expression Cookbook in HTML format. HTML format loads much faster even while displaying one complete recipe per web page, even if it spans a dozen pages in the printed book.
We recently obtained a free trial subscription to Safari Books Online. We enjoyed it a lot and are considering a full subscription. I have not had a chance to use the Expressions Cookbook; however I am glad they are improving it before I get a chance to complain. Hehe.
Comment by Leslie — Monday, 31 August 2009 @ 23:42
Hey, Jan–
I am checking out the Regex Cookbook. I have a subscription to Safari, O’Reilly’s online ebook service. I hope you see some compensation for that! I’ve been using RegexBuddy for several years and have always valued that program for its explanatory style. RegexBuddy led me to your website, and I have the greatest respect for your clear and engaging writing on a highly technical topic. I appreciate being able to get the job done and at the same time glimpse some of the deep wind-up beauty of the mechanism at the same time. Cheers!
Comment by SmoGrep — Wednesday, 6 January 2010 @ 22:58
I get the same royalty percentage if you read the book on Safari Books Online than if you buy a printed copy. The price of each book you read is calculated by dividing your monthly subscription rate by the number of pages you read from each book. So if you read 10 books in a month on Safari and we assume each book has the same number of pages and each book has one author who gets a 10% royalty, then each of those 10 authors gets 1% of the fee you paid to Safari for that month. Safari keeps 55% which is the discount that bookstores selling physical books usually get. The publishers of the 10 books you read split the remaining 35%.
So yes, I get some compensation, but it’s not going to make me rich.
Comment by Jan Goyvaerts — Thursday, 7 January 2010 @ 14:16