Judge it by the cover?
July 3, 2017 10:11 AM   Subscribe

O'Reilly books have a long and storied career; they were the technical guidebooks to the evolving internet, and were an incredibly important part of how developers learned how to get things done. Due to their high standards and strong editorial requirements, it was always difficult to get signed as one of their authors. Today, this has all changed. With the publication of the O RLY Book Cover Generator , anyone can create their own animal cover book... cover.
posted by jenkinsEar (35 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite
 


I ran the computer section (among other things) at a Borders for 6 years. I shelved so many of these fuckers.
posted by jonmc at 10:32 AM on July 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


I still can't get the link working, but I made this for a buddy.

If you know him, it is SO true.
posted by Samizdata at 10:36 AM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Halp! Halp me!
When did so many meetings become normal?
posted by djeo at 10:44 AM on July 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


The new hotness.
posted by tocts at 10:56 AM on July 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


I bought so many of those books over the years; now the idea of using a book to learn any language or framework seems ridiculous in the age of constant change. Any book is going to be totally out of date by the time it's published.
posted by octothorpe at 10:58 AM on July 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


Too bad they didn't include a tarsier as one of the possible animals, because Unix in a Nutshell's cover inspired this all-time classic.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:23 AM on July 3, 2017 [30 favorites]


This has redeemed my entire day. Thank you, thank you.
posted by randomkeystrike at 11:26 AM on July 3, 2017




My online gaming group is about 10 episodes into "Beyond The Mountains of Madness" for The Call of C'thulhu RPG, and this book would be appropriate.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 11:36 AM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


I ran the computer section (among other things) at a Borders for 6 years. I shelved so many of these fuckers.

jonmc, did you ever shelve Wrox Press's Professional Site Server 3.0 by Marco Tabini?

Wrox's house style at the time was to put the authors on the cover of the books, usually pretty dull b&w photos of awkward tech nerds in polos. But Marco Tabini's cover pic came with a little extra sass, of the kind that would not look out of place on the cover of Tiger Beat, and it was a source of endless amusement for myself and my Borders colleagues.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:42 AM on July 3, 2017 [6 favorites]


This is a nice find, thanks.

O'Reilly cover art spoofs are great. My current fave.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:00 PM on July 3, 2017 [18 favorites]


Imagining a mashup of an O'Reilly computer book with a Bill O'Reilly "Killing History" book, but it would definitely require a Lovecraftian monster mascot.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:05 PM on July 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm surprised there was nothing like this created in the Web 1.0 era, circa 1999.
posted by Apocryphon at 12:22 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Too bad they didn't include a tarsier as one of the possible animals, because Unix in a Nutshell's cover inspired this all-time classic.

I think I still have the complete woodcut in high quality somewhere on my hard drive because I thought of printing it on a shirt to the front row of the Flaming Lips in a festival around here.
Then I heard Wayne Coyne's live voice and yeah, that was not going to happen.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:25 PM on July 3, 2017


The person who created this has a few good ones here: O RLY Book Covers.

I would totally buy the Stack Overflow and Google ones.
posted by ralan at 1:56 PM on July 3, 2017 [9 favorites]


My Contribution
posted by Horkus at 2:28 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


An oldie but a goodie.
posted by hanov3r at 2:37 PM on July 3, 2017


> The person who created this has a few good ones here: O RLY Book Covers.
> I would totally buy the Stack Overflow and Google ones.


I'm perfectly capable of copypastaing from StackOverflow without aid.
I'd still buy Blaming the user just for having it prominently on display, though.
posted by farlukar at 2:55 PM on July 3, 2017




Apocryphon: I'm surprised there was nothing like this created in the Web 1.0 era, circa 1999.

I've definitely seen O'Reilly book cover generators before, some a long time ago, but I don't know if any of them went back that far.

I just recently disposed of my shelf of O'Reilly books, finally admitting that I was keeping them entirely for sentiment since it wasn't like I would look anything up in a book these days.
posted by tavella at 3:10 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


I am disappoint that an owl is not one of the animal options, but Marker liked cats so
posted by juv3nal at 3:42 PM on July 3, 2017


I ran the computer section (among other things) at a Borders for 6 years. I shelved so many of these fuckers.

I've noticed that recently the Barnes and Noble compute section has been just gutted; it's like 1/3 the size it used to be.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:17 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Small warning: if, like me, you remember this from at least ten years ago and go hunting for the original sites, there are several (eg "oreillymaker") that now lead to horribly dodgy pages, which try and get you to click on confirmation alerts. Just take it as given that there used to be a really cool "O RLY" generator back around 2007 or so, OK? ;-)
posted by pjm at 5:43 PM on July 3, 2017


I remember buying a bunch of those Wrox titles with big author pics on the front, Strange Interlude, and becoming strangely infatuated with the geeky-and-sweet guy on "The Art of Rails".

Strange times, indeed... Must have been the eyes!
posted by pjm at 5:50 PM on July 3, 2017




As a young PC addict who enjoyed writing .bat files in the nineties, nothing got me more disinterested in programming and software development than looking at the covers of O'Reilly books. Even back then they smelled like old man and church.

A 500+ page VBScript "in a nutshell" "desktop quick reference" with a worried almost-doberman on the cover? Get the fuck outta here.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:13 PM on July 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


This is horribly addictive.
posted by motty at 9:22 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


Cheers to whoever fixed my image link, BTW! You are awesome!
posted by Samizdata at 10:54 AM on July 4, 2017


seriously
posted by secret about box at 11:51 AM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


YA RLY.

There were no owls.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 12:10 PM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


As a young PC addict who enjoyed writing .bat files in the nineties, nothing got me more disinterested in programming and software development than looking at the covers of O'Reilly books.

O'Rly? Internets is my second career, (so as a nerd, I started old and have just gotten older) and I've maybe purchased a half-ton of books over the last 20 years. I usually found O'Reilly books were very good, and often the best books overall (eg the whole Nutshell series) and I very much equate their sparse, simple covers with a superior book. I think the woodcuts are generally classy.

It's a great visual brand, and I've always liked it better than Wrox's red plus nerd poster, or Manning's infatuation with Middle Ages archetypes.

The proof of its effectiveness as a visual brand is of course that it's the go-to style when satirizing computer books.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:23 PM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


As a young PC addict who enjoyed writing .bat files in the nineties

As a measure of how much things have changed, a journalist I knew in the early 90s had made a million - literally - by writing a very fat book of DOS batch file scripts.

At the time, I thought - golly, there's my pension plan if this job goes south. Ho, ho, ho bloody ho.
posted by Devonian at 1:06 PM on July 4, 2017


This rules.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:04 PM on July 5, 2017


Made me laugh. And BTW, most O'Reilly authors don't get to choose their animals. It's marketing, not content-driven. I think I rejected one animal though.
posted by mdoar at 12:54 PM on July 6, 2017


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