O'Reilly Publishing House

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O'Reilly Publishing House

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The O'Reilly Verlag [ / əˈɹaɪli / ] is the German branch of the international computer book publisher O'Reilly Media . In linguistic usage, however, no distinction is made between the US headquarters and the German branch.

The publisher is a well-known name in the IT industry: it is known for detailed technical presentations of numerous practical IT topics. There are compact reference books on numerous topics that are limited to the essential options and parameters of certain software. These works are called in the international as well as in the German-language editions in a nutshell . The books in the Pocket Reference series , whose German-language editions are described as short & good , have an even more compact form .

history

In 1978 Tim O'Reilly founded the publishing house in the USA . O'Reilly had previously been a consultancy writing technical manuals for companies. In order to compensate for the fluctuating order situation, the existing material was reused by the employees in the “In-a-nutshell” manuals.

"In a nutshell" (literally "in a nutshell") is an academic expression ( in nuce ) from Latin and means something like "in a nutshell, in short, short and sweet", so it stands for a particularly compact and compressed form of representation. The nutshell series should not be confused with the books in the short & good series (in English: Pocket Reference ).

O'Reilly is now firmly established in the computer publishing industry: He is ranked 4th on the ranking of computer book publishers in the USA. It is one of the last privately owned publishers. In July 2015, dpunkt.verlag took over the German-language book program.

Important events in the company's history

Ed Krol's 1992 title The Whole Internet is considered one of the greatest milestones . The book has sold more than a million copies over the years and has been translated into nearly 20 languages.

The title The Whole Internet gave rise to O'Reilly's first online activity: The Global Network Navigator (GNN) was the first online magazine in the summer of 1993.

In 1994 the publishing house founded its German branch. The German branch publishes not only translations , but also original German titles, some of which were then translated into English.

In summer 1997, the first took place Perl - Conference ( TPF ) in San Jose instead. That was because O'Reilly was the employer of the inventor of the Perl programming language , Larry Wall , for years . Since then, O'Reilly has organized a comprehensive open source conference ( OSCON ) every year , which includes the TPF .

In 2004, O'Reilly Media attracted international attention with the term Web 2.0 as the title of a conference series, with which this word was significantly coined in linguistic usage.

The owner Tim O'Reilly is therefore a well-known figure in the open source environment. He is also a committed opponent of software patents . In addition, O'Reilly is the first internationally renowned publisher of several books as OpenBook under the free GNU Free Documentation License Set (GNU FDL).

The German branch was closed in 2015.

Trademark

A hand drawing of an animal is emblazoned on the cover of all books in the traditional O'Reilly book series : On Perl books a camel , the Java book, for example, adorns the Java tiger , which is considered to be extinct . The idea for this came from Edie Freedman , who initially used old engravings of animals, but later switched to hand drawings in view of the flood of titles.

O'Reilly-Verlag even has a book about the cover animals available ( O'Reillys Tierleben. In short. ISBN 3-89721-220-X ), and many books contain a colophon about the animals. O'Reilly has the representation of animals in connection with the treated topic protected as a trademark ; the pearl camel, for example, is a protected trademark.

One of the early exceptions that didn't show an animal is emoticons . In short , the title page is adorned with smileys . Various newer O'Reilly book series such as Hacks or the original German series Basics use a different layout with different title motifs.

colophon

The O'Reilly-Verlag has been offering insights into the books and authors of the publisher in an irregular podcast with Tim Pritlove since 2010 . In this, the subjects of the books are in the foreground and are explained in more detail in discussions with the authors.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b dpunkt.verlag takes over the German-language O'Reilly program , heise.de, report from April 27, 2015.