[DannyPage]

You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.

That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.

[joshvm]

Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.

But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.

At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.

[Finnucane]

My university library has dropped their subscription, and they're pointing us at the local public library which still has it, for the moment.