heh. O'Reilly can be hit-and-miss. I've found their 'intro to subject' books to be uniformly good (Java in a nutcase, learning xml, the perl and regexp books). Their "more advanced books" have been hit and miss (e.g. Java Performance Tuning is awesome. The servlet programming one is not good). Their Oracle books are either dry as toast (all the PL/SQL books) or flat-out atrocious (Their DBA book). I tend to judge the quality of an O'Reilly book by the size of its type. Too big == fluff, too small == dense and tedious.