I agree O'Reilly is way too expensive.

I get the O’Reilly subscription through the ACM. It’s an extra $75 a year after a regular ACM membership. A lot less than $500/year.

The big name companies in tech are mostly extractive nightmares including FAANG. Orielly is the least of our problems.

I get it through my public library.

I just checked, and I've had an O'Reilly account since March of 2014 without major interruption, back when it was called Safari. It is by far the best source for high quality tech content out there. There is so much filler content in tech blogs, that I'm happy to pay to get access to high quality.

I must be on some grandfathered plan though, as I'm not paying near $500/year. That is a very steep price.

Yeah, I agree about the O'Reilly app. It's pretty bad, so I'm actually thinking about just getting the book instead of using their app.

At one time I worked at a research institute. It had a huge library that was only partially filled. One of the directors wanted to buy every developer their own Safari subscription. The cost was quoted at around $4K/mo IIRC.

I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at the time.

We ended up getting Safari subscriptions for everyone.

You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.

That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.

Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work.

The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a direction - time will tell if it's the right one.

Personally, I'd love a website that can provide all the ebooks oreilly provides. But it needs to work on a tablet.

If you are in Bay area, San Francisco public library gives access to O'Reilly for free, if you have library card, while it does not improve usability issues, at 0 cost it is phenomenal resource.