Safari Books Online (https://learning.oreilly.com/) is an awesome resource to get your hands on all sorts of technical books!
It has a huge collection of technical books and videos. If you want to buy a paper copy of an expensive book and are not sure if you would like it or now, you can probably check on that book first over here (I see many of the books I wanted to buy have their digital copies here). If you are OK with studying on your mobile or laptop, this is golden for you. I prefer the good old paper books for technical stuff but it might be different for you.
In addition to the books themselves, there are quite a lot of videos from various authors, that can act as companion material for their books. There are quite a few independent technical videos as well. I keep seeing crash courses, introductory lectures, etc. on various upcoming technologies as well.
You can add sections of the books you want or the entire books themselves to your “Queue”. This is like a bookmark system. You can go back to the Queue later to access your books. In addition to the web page, you have the Safari Queue app, which enables you to view the books and videos on your mobile / tab. Also, the same can be saved for offline viewing as well.
The subscription for Safari is slightly on the higher side for someone like me but I found another option. There is a website called acm.org. Though I have not explored this site in its entirety, I found that it offers a full subscription to Safari books, when you are subscribed to acm.org (https://www.acm.org/education/learning-center). This seemed like a steal deal for me and I went ahead and got the annual subscription. Though the Professional membership is 99 USD per year, for Indians the price reduces to INR 1148 per year. This is a steal deal for sure (please note that the Professional Membership is required for getting the Safari books subscription). Thus, ensure to select the “Professional Membership” option. I would recommend the “Digital Only” option, since this is sufficient for now.
If you encounter any errors during the process or if you find that you were made a member of ACM but are not able to log in to safaribooks, do contact the excellent support staff of ACM.org. I had goofed up my registration process but they fixed it for me very quickly.
The acm.org website in itself is really superb and has quite a lot of resources on everything computer related (and many other other interesting topics). I am yet to explore more on this.
Once you get the acm professional membership, once you navigate to the safaribooksonline website and try logging in using your acm mail id, it will redirect the web page to the acm login page. Using your acm.org credentials, you can log into Safaribooks.
I hope to make good use of this facility. I would recommend you do too!
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