It was easy to login, but I never found any explanation, like on the home page, to tell me how book slots worked.  Now, I'm not a genius, but I figured it out.  Why some books take 2 slots, I'll never know?  Anyway, I did my search for .NET books.  As soon as I found a few, I clicked one to add it to my bookshelf.  How long does a book stay on the shelf?  Anyway, the search was reset after I confirmed I wanted the book.  I had to remember what page in the list I was on to get back to where I selected the book from.  It happened a second time as well.... Quite annoying.  I found there was no reason to reset the search cause I clicked to add two books in rapid succession, and that worked.

After I added 8 books, I went to my bookshelf to see that I had one month to read them all.  Not bad, after I did, I could read some more.  I clicked a book and went to the CD to download the contents I assume.  At first, I couldn't figure out how to read the book, so I clicked table of contents.  At first glance the contents don't look like links, but they are.  They deviated from the standard hypertext underline to designate links to make it look good.  I clicked, and after a long wait...  Safari took a while, but pages started appearing.  I hit next a few times and each page came up slowly.  Each section of a chapter was visible, but not whole chapters at a time.  

Apparently I could print a section, so I tried and all it did was pop the section into another browser in a printable version.

I started browsing through the books, and overall I was impressed with everything but the speed of Safari.  I am not particularly happy about reading online, but overall it seems to work.  

I decided to try to email a section to see the results, so I picked a good sized section and hit email.  A moment later, I had the opportunity to enter an email address along with a comment.  I entered one of my email addresses and hit send.  A few minutes later I received an email with a link to the chapter.  I clicked the link and found that it didn't give me the entire section but just a few paragraphs with a message to login.  So, in conclusion, you can't send a friend the link via the Safari website, you should just click print, then email the page to a friend.  I found this acceptable, I just wonder if they figured that people would never hit print then email the page.  I figure that if you just send the link, then the user you are sending the document to should be a Safari subscriber already.

I then tried to bookmark a page using IE and not the Safari bookmark feature.  It returned me to a page that required me to login.  I logged in and I was happy to find that it returned me to the page I had bookmarked.  I would have hated to try to find that page again.  If you use the Safari bookmark feature you can easily return to your page after you log in. 

I hit add note, wondering what it would do and I was sent to another page that allowed me to enter a note.  The note type could be private or public.  I was wondering if the public notes were searchable?   How would one get to see the public notes of others?  I went to Advanced search to find out.  Nothing appeared to target the public notes, so I wonder if the public notes are only meant for the authors.  Private notes are quite self-explanatory, but they shouldn't push you away from the page you were reading just to make a note.  As soon as the note page came up I forgot what I was reading to write a note on.  What if I wanted to jot down some code fragment.  I guess I should copy the fragment then paste it into the note.  Why wouldn't I just paste it someplace on my PC?

I tried a second search for DirectX and I was disappointed that the results listed everything from Linux to Java to Director to Flash.  Maybe they had references to DirectX, but apparently Safari had a limited number of books on DirectX so they showed me about 95 books that didn't directly deal with DirectX.

Out of curiosity I selected a book and hit the buy print version button.  A new browser launched with the InformIT.com site all set to a page to help me purchase the book.  Not that I don't care for InformIT, but the book was ~$45 after a $5 rebate for being a Safari member.  I thought what a cool deal, then I went to compare the book's price at a website I use, and I found the book for sale at many places below the $45 price.  I found the same book for ~$33 to  ~$56 with 13 places below $45.  I know Safari and Informit are probably related, but Safari would do the computer community a better service if they just linked them to http://www.bestbookdeal.com .  By the way, you can check the same book without subscribing to Safari, I choose "ASP.NET Developer's JumpStart" to compare.

In conclusion, I visited Safari off and on during my trial period.  My biggest problem is that I forget that I have the subscription.  I have looked at about 10 books in the past 2 months with topics mostly targeting VB.NET, C#, or ASP.NET.  I find that the books are a bit older than I would like, but I guess for the price it is probably worth it.  

Some things I would like to see, is a search that looks in the content of multiple books, not just the book or author names.  This would help me determine if a book had the information I was actually looking for.  I would also like the ability to check out books for shorter time spans than 30 days.  I found that I checked a book out, read what I wanted, then I was stuck with it for the duration.  I would also like to be able to email a friend a chunk chapter fragment or something like that, right now I have to cut and paste, or save an .mht file.

Overall Safari is a neat alternative to purchasing computer books that will end up getting dusty on my bookshelf anyway.

Manuel Dennis III
VBLG Mentor
GNONUG Moderator