O'Reilly Hack 8.31.0 + Redeem Codes

First off, I love the content of this app and appreciate the developers who have made it a reality so I hope the poor rating and following statements only encourage the platforms growth.

My biggest complaint is how painful the transition process is between devices. I would love to pick up where I left off on my iPad when I switch to my MacBook and, then later, back again. I'm thankful that the history seems to sync up (most of the time) but in the scenario provided I generally have to go searching through the book to find where I was on the other device. The irony is the highlighting seems to persist so clearly the location could likely as well.

Also, (another major pain point) I like to have a few books I'm consistently working through but often open up a number of other books for reference throughout the day. This result in an absolute disaster in my history. It would be nice to pin a few books to the top of the history view or very least filtering and sorting capabilities so these books don't get lost in the clutter. Obviously deleting the others is an option but then you lose visibility to the fact that you've referencd the book before so it's only a half-baked remedy to an unsolved problem.

Over a quarter of a century ago, facing being laid off for the first time, I realized I had no marketable skills. I vowed to never be in that situation again, and started a lifelong habit of reading one Techncial book a month. It cost me $40-50, but worth it.

Jist like programming skills, problem with technical books is the knowledge rots. Every few years you need to update your knowledge of the tools you already know, on top of learning new skills. Even worse, a new project at work might involve a scramble to figure out which books to buy. No time to research, and no time to pop down to a store or wait for a book. Internet time!

Ten years ago I discovered O’Reilly. Thousands of books. New one all the times. Preprints of not yet published books. Heaven!

New project? Check out 2-3 books and read the most relevant chapters. New technology? Read a primer then pick out the advanced book that catches your eye. Refresh? Read the newest version of the classic book about your favorite technology.

Online courses and special streaming events? Bonus.

If you are an employer and have not purchased this for your employers, then hang your head for 10 minutes and feel shame, the fix it.

If you are a tech person, do not rely on your employer - get your own subscription so your reading lists never expire.

Do what I did, and take responsibility for your own education.

I don’t recommend using the app at all. In the old days the app was like an extension to the website where you could easily pick up where you left off. Now all you get are “Trending”, “Upcoming Conferences”, “Recommended For You” and “Recently Added”. No history of what you had been reading or watching on the web. There’s a tab for your playlists, but that’s a poor substitute for a history* view since that means users that often search for several distinct technologies must now save every single result to a playlist.

If you’re fortunate enough to only work in one domain and it uses a trendy technology, the app might be okay. But for anyone that used to use O’Reilly Media as a technical reference library - I’d say save yourself the time and hassle and skip this app.

* - The history feature is also broken in the web interface anyway, so I’m not really sure their learning platform as whole is worth the price anymore. It’s been broken for months now and I think that’s kind of a telling sign. Here you have a media company whose primary focus is publishing technical literature with an emphasis on software development. In that domain is website and app building - and these are the products they release. An app that basically tells you nothing more than Google and a website that only half works. Perhaps the developers should read some of the books contained in the learning platform...

I really hope O’Reilly is around for a really long time. This portal is an absolute must if you want to grow in your career and advance your skills. They have ALL the technology (and others) books you’ll ever need and want! When I need a paper copy I check it out at O’Reilly first to decide if I want it. Most of my books though are digital copies there and I read them on my IPad. They have sandboxes for learning environments, live conference access, certification training books and courses; live and on demand, and more. The app is solid rarely have any issues. I started with a paid work subscription from work 11 years ago; as soon as it expired I got my own out of pocket and have had it ever since. It’s one of the best investments I have made for my continuing education; try it and I’m sure you’ll think so too. Thank you O’Reilly team!!

Great app but really hard to download content for offline. Most of the time the downloads hang forever after a few seconds. Pausing it and resuming often leads to a corrupted file, or even freeze and crash the app. I have this problem on both my iPhone XS and iPad Pro 2018 and the customer service was unfortunately not very helpful. They told me to uninstall and reinstall the app, which didn't fix it. This happen on both mobile or wifi connection and I can confirm that my internet connection isn't the problem (good latency and bandwidth, no pb to download netflix content, etc.) This seems like a bad implementation of the network stack of the app.

Update Jan 10: App doesn't open anymore, get stuck at login. Had to uninstall and reinstall one more time. And to redownload all the contents :(

I love this app. I d love the OReilly Safari library subscription but this is an app review so all I can say is that it presents the library material ( both books and video) superbly and dependably. It handles multi gigabyte downloads with ease. The video and book reading controls are intuitive. The controls appear and go away just when you want. Text control is adjustable to just about any eyesight. Great great software here.
* * *
Follow up to original review. This no longer works on my iPad first gen. Software used to work beautifully both movies and book reader. Then they introduced serious bugs. Now at the end of it they dropped support for iOS 9. There was no need to. Things worked beautifully before.d

No side by side page layout. Please add this feature for the larger format iPads as landscape mode is easier on the hands. The app Keeps badgering me to give a rating on EVERY device I use every time I revert to the queue. Guess what? I have not used the app enough to know how useful it will be, so by pestering me in this fashion, you have earned yourselves a round zero rating (since I’ve only managed to experience annoying features so far). Congratulations. What brilliant designer thought that interrupting my workflow repeatedly to rate the app is a great idea? Finally, stop asking me to login. One login should suffice unless i am buying something through the app, which is not a feature at this time. If you must ask for credentials, then at least allow fingerprint or Face ID. Whether or not I renew my subscription will depend on content as well as how easy it is to use the app for learning new topics. And please eliminate these annoying interruptions to a learner’s workflow. I may revise my review once I’ve used the app for a few weeks.

Most of the time, it’s a good app. However, there are some design choices and bugs that make the user experience really unpleasant.

Bugs:

When I finish downloading a set of videos, for example, the “Introduction to Go Programming”, the playback progress for every video is close to the end. So if I start a lesson, I have to manually slide backward to the very beginning. And when I finish, because the following videos are all close to “finished”, it would just jump through all of them because the autoplay option is set to true.
On the web version, I can clearly see that I have not started the following lessons. However, in the app, it’s not the case. I have to manually catch and pause the video before it jumps to the next one.

Unpleasant design:

As for readings, I believe most people grow to read books page by page, left to right or right to left. However, this app forces to scroll up and down, with no pagination. That’s rather unnatural and annoying. I mean, we are not scrolling a webpage with a mouse wheel; We are using our finger tip.

No typeface selection is a bummer.

Font size is still not as large as I would like even at its largest. Readable, but not so comfortably in a distance. I need to find where I left off for a second or two, which is not so pleasant.

They say you can read books offline, but that’s mostly false in my experience. I downloaded a few books to my iPad while on WiFi, then went on a trip with no access to the internet. When I tried to read any of the books I had downloaded, it said I had to log in in order to read them, even though they were already downloaded. So I just couldn’t read anything. When I got back online later, I logged in and could read the books. I shut off WiFi and could still access the downloaded book that I had open. But if I tried to open another book, it wouldn’t let me until I got BACK online to log in again! Sorta defeats the purpose. So whatever you do, don’t plan on reading anything if you don’t have internet access, regardless of what they say.

The user experience with this app has been terrible so far for me. There’s some really great content on here and lots of potential, but it’s super frustrating to use the app to get at it.

I’m listening to a book on this app and taking notes on a secondary app. The newest update pauses the book every time I go to my notes, which is super annoying. It also pauses when I shut the screen when I just want to listen to a section. When I leave the app it doesn’t register my last point very well, so I keep getting confused where I was when combined with the mislabeled chapters. It insists on playing an audio recording with a black video screen as if it were a video, which is also super annoying.

I’m giving in two stars rather than one in hopes they can fix these things.