O’Reilly Media — my favorite technology publisher — is offering a contest in which they are giving away $500 worth of books from their catalog. To enter, one must post a public wish list to books, e-books, and videos from the O’Reilly catalog and send the URL to O’Reilly using a web form. As long as the total of all the items on your wish list is less that $500, you’re entered. The deadline is 11:59pm PST on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011, and the sweepstakes is limited to U.S. residents only.
These are the books (all in EPUB ebook format) on topics that I’m interested in or would like as reference works.
Confessions of a public speakerWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder - 25 Recipes for Getting Started with R: Excerpts from the R CookbookWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- An Introduction to Testing Web Applications with twill and SeleniumWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- Enterprise cloud computing: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the CloudWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- Cloud security and privacyWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- Complete web monitoring: Watching your visitors, performance, communities, and competitorsWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor BehaviorWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder - Google SketchUp: The Missing ManualWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- Head First PhysicsWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- Head first statisticsWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- JavaScript Patterns: Build Better Applications with Coding and Design PatternsWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Learning UML 2.0 (Learning)WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
Mining the social webWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder - PHP: the good partsWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- Programming Amazon EC2WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
- Web Operations: Keeping the Data On TimeWorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
The list totals $418.84 for the ebook versions of all of the titles. (I don’t think it is cheating to select the less expensive ebook versions; the EPUB versions are perfect for reading on-screen, searching within the books, and copying code snippets.) This post uses the WordPress Open Book Data plugin to pull information from Open Library based on ISBN and link back to the O’Reilly catalog (via the publisher name in the above list; link to the O’Reilly Media catalog entry are a requirement of a contest entry).
I don’t think I’ve mentioned O’Reilly Media on DLTJ before, but they really are my favorite technology publisher. If we were to focus on just their book publishing activities, I like how they offer free errata updates to the ebook editions. Earlier this year they announced how they retroactively went back and improved the formatting of their ebooks. Sure, it was a relatively simple thing to do, but they offer the updated editions to previous purchasers for no extra cost. That really encourages customer loyalty (and another reason why I’d like the ebook editions, should I happen to win the sweepstakes).
Beyond their book publishing, though, they are the force behind Make Magazine (all about making stuff), Ignite events (five minute talks using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds), O’Reilly Radar (insightful blog posts), and the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference. Many of the artifacts from these activities are posted freely online.
By the way, neat idea for a contest. Doing it this way probably generates a lot of Google Juice to O’Reilly items.