I'm in a very similar situation. I'm going to be attending University later this year to study computer science and along with a contract as a web developer, this means I will be spending money I can't really afford on expensive computer books, so just yesterday I was looking at the possibility of getting a safari account and drew up some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

• You'll have access to a large number of books: there are currently 1347 books available, from 14 different publishers, in a large number of different aspects of computing.
• With a starter account, each book you rent out will cost you about $2 a month, and with other account types this will work out to be even less.
• You can always upgrade your account type if you find you need more bookshelf space than you originally anticipated.
• Safari has quite a nifty little search engine that allows you to find answers to questions fairly easily
• You can cut and paste code examples instead of copying them from the book
• You don't need large shelving units that can hold all those heavy books :)
• It's cheaper to rent large amounts of books than it is to buy them all, especially when you may not extensively use some of them.
• You aren't left with redundant copies of books when texts get updated.

Disadvantages

• Safari is an electronic reference library, not an offline viewer. It assumes you have a reliable, unmetered and readily available internet connection.
• The only acceptable payment method currently is by credit card, and only certain international credit cards are accepted.
• If your interests lie in one specific area of computing, e.g. Perl, Linux, then in the long term it is cheaper to buy a CD bookshelf or hard copies of books then it is to subscribe to safari.
• If you are lucky enough to live near a well stocked local or college library then you can loan out the books for free.
• Safari uses detection software to prevent people from using spider software to download entire texts. This isn't entirely foolproof, so you may find yourself being logged off or have your account suspended for otherwise innocent behaviour like fast reading safari books.

In conclusion, I think that a safari account subscription would be a good idea if you require to have access to a number of different fields of computing, some of which you may only need to dip into briefly for a specific task. However, if you only work in a specific aspect, say Linux or Perl, and use books as a constant reference that will always be found lying on your desk, then it's cheaper in the long run to buy a paper version or something like a CD bookshelf. Or maybe do a combination of both a starter safari subscription and have a couple of well thumbed through manuals :)

I hope this helps!

--
Rozallin J. Thompson
The Webmistress who doesn't hesitate to use strict;

wait until you get to school, they might have a group account. i stumbled across a 'free chapter' link a while back and when i hit the safari site i found myself magicaly logged in as a 'user from the University of Foo' with access to all of the books.

if not, bug the library and IT people. a site license for a University is probably costly, but worth it.

our safari access disapeared as mysteriously as it appeared, it took a few emails about and a couple of weeks, but it's back. =P

if i were paying for access i would probably setup a squid cache with long expiration times so i could check back over what i'd recently seen while on the road or in the park (with my laptop) but since it's sorta free i don't have the urge to protect my investment in information availability.

i may not have figured out the right way to use the UI, currently i find it quite annoying to navigate the library and the books, and the pages are way too short so a lot of time is wasted 'turning the page'.

otherwise it's quite nice to have so many books seconds away.

real books are nice, but a pain to move every semester. plus they're often out of date after the 4 years you're using them (or at least a couple of editions behind, plus no corrections).

Funny, rozallin and I were chatting about this just the other day...

At the very least the Safari system (the only one I know of) does "catch" people who are perfectly innocent. They send you mysterious messages:

This e-mail is to notify you that an unusual usage alert has been triggered on your Safari Tech Books Online account. Safari does this to protect your account in the event it is being compromised and to protect Safari's intellectual property. Please see Safari's Terms of Service. Continued alerts will result in the system locking out your account.

Please make sure that you are not running programs that 'speed-up' web browsing; or that spider, crawl, or capture web pages for offline viewing. These types of tools will trigger further alerts and violate the Safari Terms of Service.

Thank you, The Technical Support Team Safari Tech Books Online

They appear to do this by logging regular and repetitive page downloads. I know people who have downloaded tons of stuff off of their service by setting their spider to download at random intervals.

Others have been caught by the Safari service as well. I found the following links here and here (two posts by the same author) to be very informative. And I can confirm zentara's post as a situation that has occurred with at least two Safari customers.

If you are considering signing up for the service, make sure you read the Terms of Service carefully. If you teach, for example, there are limits to how many chapters you can reproduce for your students. That can seriously reduce the total value of the service to you.

An advantage that has yet to be mentioned (at least explicitly) is for people who live in places where these books are not easy to find (like a lot of Eastern Europe). But are these same people likely to have the kind of internet connection necessary to get the most out of the service?

--
Allolex

If you run into the spider throttler again during normal use, Safari tech support might be interested to hear what happened. They're always trying to reduce false positives.

I've been subscribed since safari started, read well over 100 books, and have never had this problem. Try using the index on the left side of the page instead. I don't see any advantage to clicking "Next" rapidly.

copies would pop up on Russian sites within days.

I'd like to see your evidence backing this stereotype. Let me guess, you don't have any. How nice to see.

copies would pop up on Russian sites within days. I'd like to see your evidence backing this stereotype. Let me guess, you don't have any. How nice to see.

Well all you have to do is go to google and search for "Perl bookshelf ru" and you'll find them. Why should put links to these sites in my post?

1. 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.
2. 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