When I wrote my book on Windows Azure for O'Reilly, they originally assigned me some bird which I hated. I wanted them to pick a pug or some dog (because Azure was originally code named 'Red Dog'). To my surprise, they hunted down a dog that was actually called a 'red dog' and we used that instead.
Oh yes, thanks for the link. Everyone, please go buy as many copies as you can ;).
Seriously though, all the royalties go to charity. I'm a bit sad how quickly portions of the book went out of date. I've been asked to do a second edition but probably don't have the time to do it given startup commitments.
That's rather insulting to O'Reilly's artists. Do you really think that if they could not have copied those images they used on the first few books, they could not have mustered the skill to draw animals themselves?
I'm sure they could have. But would they? The story would have at least played out differently if that initial conversation had gone, "hey, let's pay someone to painstakingly draw animals and then transfer them to scratchboard" rather than "hey, look at these gorgeous woodcuts".
We now go to the original sources of the old engravings (we have a big library of old books full of them), and we also have a few illustrators who are able to work in that style. When we started out, we had no money for high-end illustrations; luckily the animal images I chose for the series were in the public domain. Fortuitous.
The cover designs of O'Reilly books are truly awesome (and I don't use that word often).
They are not only recognizable in a "brand" kind of way, but they are also professional looking, simple but with a twist of the creativity that differentiate programmers from other technical professions.
Am I the only one who doesn't like these covers? They're unique, and I love that, but sometimes I wish they had more character, not just a single color animal.
Yes i feel the same, ive learned to accept them, but call me callous i like my books to have interesting and attractive art, in a non sexual way of course
I've gotten so used to them on my shelf, I rarely pay attention. I just go for the camel book(Perl) or the cow book(C). A classy trademark, love it - and the Oreilly quality has never dropped. Congratulatiosn and keep the awesome titles coming!
I've noticed that my kids were always drawn to the animal art at age 3-4. A nice project (maybe for charity) from O'Reilly would be a children's book with collection of these covers. I think it would be a hit.
I'm saddened by the dragon part because what fascinates me most about these covers is that, most of these amazing animals are really there some where. But now I have to wonder if the one on the cover really exists or product of some ones wild imagination... I hope they ditch this mythical stuff..
I do find O'Reilly to be the most consistently good technical publisher around. They are also one of the few counterexamples to the idea that you can't judge books by the covers.
