Your own librarian
Sep 13, 23:19
I am in the market for a few books on programming and applications, and earlier today I stumbled upon a service offered by O’Reilly: Safari Bookshelf. Instead of buying hard copy books, reading/scanning them once, and then using them for occasional reference, you pay $15-20 a month to have access to roughly ten books (I say roughly because books are distributed in “slot” units; so far all the book I have been interested have filled a single slot). Which is all very cool- assuming that you don’t mind reading lots of text on the screen.
I thought I could deal with it. The two books I had been looking at in the store (Macromedia® Flash™ MX 2004 ActionScript: Training from the Source and Essential ActionScript 2.0) were both available, and for what I would have paid I can get between 3 and 6 months of Safari, depending on where I chose to purchase them.
Especially since I could put the book on my second screen and still work on the other one, I thought that it was going to work out really well. I got to work learning some Actionscript 2.0.
Then I tried to download the example files that would have been on a CD had I paid for a hard copy edition of the book. They are available on a web site that is linked to on the book’s description page. It looks like someone basically copied the entire contents of the CD into that web directory, which is a nice thought, but the problem is that there are 21 lessons, each containing two folders that then contain numerous files. There was no way that I was going to work my way through all those directories and subdirectories.
But what they don’t mention is that you can access this server supports WebDAV connections. On Mac OS X, enter the URL of the example site in the “Connect to Server” dialog box. The Finder will mount that folder as a networked drive, and you can drag the desired folders to your hard disk.
They really ought to make this more obvious.