[SGVLUG] More (almost) free books [and discounts...]

[Emerson, Tom (*IC)]

All this talk about books reminded me that we have access to "(nearly)
free" O'Reilly books [as well as a 35% discount]

  First, the easy part: to get a 35% discount, use the code "DSUG" when
ordering on-line from O'Reilly -- this is available to everyone (mainly
because we don't have any "formal" means of identifying "members", so by
default, "everyone" who reads this is a member for purposes of getting
the discount...) and is "easy" because you don't have to have anyone
else do anything for you to get this.

  Now, the not-so-easy part: getting books "for free" (or nearly so):
O'Reilly does offer "review" copies of their books.  All they ask is
that you actually post a review somewhere (I'll even create a section on
our website for reviews if you get them to me)  The "review" doesn't
need to be the size of the book -- just a couple of paragraphs will do.
I realize that this doesn't sound hard, but the hard part is getting
--ME-- to actually forward your request to O'Reilly so that you can get
said book to review.

  So, if you want to "review" a book from O'Reilly [which, BTW, includes
their sub-publishers: "no starch press", Paraglyph, PC Publishing,
Pragmatic, Rocky Nook(?), SitePoint, and YoungJin] here is what you need
to do:

   1) send me an e-mail with the subject "I want to review <title> from
O'Reilly"
   2) in the body, include the title and the book's ISBN 
   3) ALSO include your mailing address
   4) [the hard part] KEEP ON MY CASE to get this done ;)

Yes, I know it should only take "a few seconds" for me to forward an
item, but because it is so quick and easy to do, I tend to put it off
(in deference to "getting something more difficult done first") and
ultimately forget about it (my bad)  [and double-yes, I've gone through
the Franklin/covey time management seminars AND have a planner, so I
should know how to avoid this fall-through-the-crack problem, but
writing down "forward e-mail for book review" and assigning it an
ABC/123 ranking would take longer than actually forwarding the e-mail,
so I never write it down...]