Accessing Digital Resources

This section asks a simple question: what is Safari Books Online? It sits in the chapter on accessing digital resources, which means the subject is something you reach through digital access rather than a physical book on a shelf. The section's short answer is that Safari Books Online is the subject being described here, and the sections that follow are meant to build a working understanding of it.

The material for this section is brief, so it is worth being precise about what it can and cannot support. A useful way to approach any introductory question about a resource is to separate three things: the name of the thing, the claims made about it, and the evidence that supports those claims. Keeping these apart lets you write an accurate description even when the source gives you only a little to work with.

The available material supports four statements with confidence. Each one can be used as a firm starting point, because the section itself states it.

Notice how modest these four statements are. They tell you where the topic lives and what the section is for. They do not tell you what the resource actually does, how it works, or what you will find inside it. Recognizing that boundary is the first step of the checking habit this article is building.

Just as important is what the material leaves out. It does not supply a detailed definition, a list of features, steps for signing in or searching, or any specific examples of content. These gaps are real. An honest reading of this section names them rather than filling them with assumed detail.

The temptation when a source is thin is to add plausible details from memory. A detail that sounds right is not the same as a detail the source supports, and a learner who cannot tell the two apart will carry wrong information forward. The safer habit is to sort each statement you want to make into one of two piles: supported, or needing verification.

Before you rely on any description of an unfamiliar resource, run through the same short sequence each time. Each step narrows what you are allowed to assume.

A printed or downloaded book has a fixed amount of content, but its subject keeps changing. Corrections are discovered after publication, code examples may need updated files, and readers often want more detail than a single book can hold. For this reason, publishers attach supporting material to their books and point readers to where it lives online. Learning to find that material turns a static text into a connected body of resources.

The source gives an example address for a book on introductory machine learning with Python: http://bit.ly/intro-machine-learning-python. This is a shortened link, so it redirects to the page rather than naming it directly. Typing it into a browser takes you to the page that holds the book's additional material.

The page holds three categories of material. Each one answers a different kind of question. The diagram below shows how they sit together under one page.

Beyond the page for a single book, the publisher maintains a wider online presence. Its main website at http://www.oreilly.com is the place to find information about its books, courses, conferences, and news. The presence also extends to social media: the publisher's Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels let you follow the same organization on several platforms, each serving a slightly different purpose.

The material does not say which kinds of news or content appear on each individual channel. If you need that detail, check the channel itself rather than assuming what it contains.

The two kinds of resource answer different questions. Use the book web page when your question is about one specific book: a correction, a sample program, or extra material for a chapter. Use the publisher's website or social channels when your question is about the publisher as a whole, such as upcoming courses, conferences, or news about its books in general.

A good next step is to start with the book page, because it is the most specific source. Move to the publisher's channels only if the book page does not answer your question. The flowchart below turns that reasoning into a sequence of questions.

Follow the flowchart with a concrete need. Suppose you suspect a line of code in one book's chapter is wrong. The question is about one specific book, so the first decision leads to the book web page. Before you conclude the code is wrong, the errata on that page are the place to check. The publisher's social channels would not be the right first stop, because they serve the publisher as a whole rather than one book's corrections.