5/12/2017

Safari Books review

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I've been using Safari Books for a while and I'm pretty happy with their service. I started 4 years ago when my past employer paid me the annual subscription. I could say that it's a big resource of books and courses and that I completely recommend their usage. When I left my job, one thing that I REALLY missed was my SafariBooks account.

The monthly fee is 39 $US a month and 399 $US annual. I know that could seem a bit expensive, but if you are always studying and doing some research it's a fair trade. Imagine that monthly, you are taking a couple of Udemy Courses, downloading some books to your kindle (sometimes IT books can be a bit expensive), with this type of study habit, you could spend easily 30-40 $US.

When you purchase the subscription you have access to literally thousand of books and courses on the latest IT topics (Cloud, docker, machine learning, etc) and other subjects like economy, self-develop, marketing, etc.

If we compare with other services like Lynda (www.lynda.com), I think they are more technically oriented ( Lynda is pretty good giving some first entry courses and basic fundamentals), but if you want to find a book about deep learning algorithms or applied physics, safari book is the place.

The benefit of this platform is that you can have access to basic and more advanced material in lots of study subjects.

I think that purchase this type of service can be a benefit in cases where you are a researcher/teacher or you are constantly studying or interested in latest technologies. If you are a casual reader/student, probably is not a good choice.

The service can be used either via the web or through your cell phone/tablet. The application it's available for android and IOS. 

The application used is called Safari Queue and you can find it in IOS and Android marketplace. The old application was called  Safari to go, unfortunately, it's deprecated. Personally, I like more this old version, than the new one.

I can name some pros and cons of this new version:

PROS

Unlike the Safari to go version, you can download the books/videos in an unlimited way (you need to make sure that you have enough space in your cell phone/tablet because video courses tend to be a bit bigger). With the Safari to go version, you were able to download only 3 books, that can be read in an offline mode when you don't have internet access. Video download was not allowed

CONS

This couldn't be a problem for some people, but for me it is. The old version was able to create some categories in order to arrange your books and videos for a particular subject (IT, math, physics, economy, platforms, etc), also you were able to create a playlist with your favorite content and share it between Safari users. The latest version manages a big "queue", with all your videos and books, without any option of tagging or grouping the content.
Well, this was a small review of this platform, that I definitely recommend. You can find below some interesting links

- SafariBooks
- Safari Android & IOS app

Thanks for visiting !!!

Best Regards

Rodolfo


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