I've been quite happy with my Safari subscription. I use it for two reasons:
- Search. I hate using indexes. They're never really complete and they require me to rememeber the order of letters in the alphabet. Yes, that actually is a problem for me. Go figure. Safari's search engine is very good, in my experience.
- Speed. When I'm doing design work on a new project I often need to evaluate technologies that I've only heard about second-hand. Safari has vastly cut down the time and money I spend in this activity.
I recommend you sign up for their free trial (if they still offer one) and see how you like it. A lot depends on your willingness to read lots of text on a monitor. But if you're a programmer, that's pretty much your job!
-sam