What is it that I love about O’Reilly books? I’m specifically talking about I can’t help but love the animals on the cover. I mean, what’s not to love about a book that has pictures of a duck or a blue jay or a rhinocerous on the cover? In oreilly.com’s words: “Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects.”
But inside the covers there’s usually a pretty good treatment of some technical computer-programming type topic. And that’s the real reason I’ve fallen in love with some of their books. If I have a question about how to do something in VBA for an Excel macro I’m working on perfecting, I grab my duck book and usually have an answer within minutes.
With respect to “breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects,” I’ve read the beginner Perl book, “Learning Perl” (aka The Llama) for fun, and really enjoyed it. The authors are witty nerds like me who enjoy teaching and creating clever phrases. Maybe someday I’ll actually start programming in Perl, but for now I’m just enjoying the entertainment value.
Here are some links to the books I’ve enjoyed.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/excelseckbk/index.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/exlmacro2/index.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progexcel/index.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learningjvscpt/index.html
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596520106/
