O Reilly Reviews

I got excited when I downloaded OReilly expecting a streamlined way to gain access to this library of books for anything I might need. As a student my signee sign on is used to access my library and everything in there. As a result I didn’t have an account here to sign in with except the LinkedIn learning option because CSULB gives students a free subscription. With my school linked to that. I successfully signed in but every time i attempted to read a book it would ask for me to sign in to read. Signing in with linkedin doesn’t function at all and just boots you back to the Home Screen. That’s kind of a huge issue as it was an option presented and, in an ideal world, should work.

Website is great though and has a massive library check that out

Short form: App lacks even basic functionality, you are going to need to use the website instead

Longer: This seems like it should be a simple proposition - give me a way to access my O’Reilly media on my phone, right? Except every UX choice seems to waver between indifferent and user-hostile. For example, all audiobooks seem to play as videos, even when they have no video content, and you had best remember where you were in the book, because OReilly is going to be no help.

Also, while you might expect that this will let you at least see what you’ve saved to your bookshelves, no such luck. If you go to the “Your O’Reilly” section, it’s strictly promotional. I was so surprised by this lack of function that I triple checked that I was logged in. I definitely am, and with a bit of searching I can find content (and even add it to my shelves!) but if I want to keep reading anything, I need to keep searching.

In short, OReilly offers nothing of use save for the shallowest of promotional features. To actually use your subscription , your only option will be to use the web site.

Incredible disappointment. It’s such a great service, but OReilly is all wasted opportunity.

No side by side page layout. Please add this feature for the larger format iPads as landscape mode is easier on the hands. OReilly Keeps badgering me to give a rating on EVERY device I use every time I revert to the queue. Guess what? I have not used OReilly enough to know how useful it will be, so by pestering me in this fashion, you have earned yourselves a round zero rating (since I’ve only managed to experience annoying features so far). Congratulations. What brilliant designer thought that interrupting my workflow repeatedly to rate OReilly is a great idea? Finally, stop asking me to login. One login should suffice unless i am buying something through OReilly , which is not a feature at this time. If you must ask for credentials, then at least allow fingerprint or Face ID. Whether or not I renew my subscription will depend on content as well as how easy it is to use OReilly for learning new topics. And please eliminate these annoying interruptions to a learner’s workflow. I may revise my review once I’ve used OReilly for a few weeks.

Continuously frustrating issues using OReilly. After the last update, again, OReilly fails to open. It’s stuck at the initial gray screen with the logo in the center. I suppose I will have to uninstall it and re-download all my offline content, again. There is no way OReilly can have a legitimate 4.6 reviews rating at the current sub-mediocre quality, features, and usability.
Using the browser on my tablet to access the content is not much better, I can not get rid of the message to use OReilly instead and I can not use offline content.
Until I find a monthly subscription alternative for technical content I guess I’m stuck with this horrible way of consuming and finding materials, and I guess the developer is well aware of the monopoly - hence the low quality and the lack of innovation demonstrated by OReilly .

I don’t recommend using OReilly at all. In the old days OReilly was like an extension to the website where you could easily pick up where you left off. Now all you get are “Trending”, “Upcoming Conferences”, “Recommended For You” and “Recently Added”. No history of what you had been reading or watching on the web. There’s a tab for your playlists, but that’s a poor substitute for a history* view since that means users that often search for several distinct technologies must now save every single result to a playlist.

If you’re fortunate enough to only work in one domain and it uses a trendy technology, OReilly might be okay. But for anyone that used to use O’Reilly Media as a technical reference library - I’d say save yourself the time and hassle and skip OReilly.

* - The history feature is also broken in the web interface anyway, so I’m not really sure their learning platform as whole is worth the price anymore. It’s been broken for months now and I think that’s kind of a telling sign. Here you have a media company whose primary focus is publishing technical literature with an emphasis on software development. In that domain is website and app building - and these are the products they release. An app that basically tells you nothing more than Google and a website that only half works. Perhaps the developers should read some of the books contained in the learning platform...

The user experience with OReilly has been terrible so far for me. There’s some really great content on here and lots of potential, but it’s super frustrating to use OReilly to get at it.

I’m listening to a book on OReilly and taking notes on a secondary app. The newest update pauses the book every time I go to my notes, which is super annoying. It also pauses when I shut the screen when I just want to listen to a section. When I leave OReilly it doesn’t register my last point very well, so I keep getting confused where I was when combined with the mislabeled chapters. It insists on playing an audio recording with a black video screen as if it were a video, which is also super annoying.

I’m giving in two stars rather than one in hopes they can fix these things.

They say you can read books offline, but that’s mostly false in my experience. I downloaded a few books to my iPad while on WiFi, then went on a trip with no access to the internet. When I tried to read any of the books I had downloaded, it said I had to log in in order to read them, even though they were already downloaded. So I just couldn’t read anything. When I got back online later, I logged in and could read the books. I shut off WiFi and could still access the downloaded book that I had open. But if I tried to open another book, it wouldn’t let me until I got BACK online to log in again! Sorta defeats the purpose. So whatever you do, don’t plan on reading anything if you don’t have internet access, regardless of what they say.

Highlighting is probably the most frequently used activity when reading. I really don't understand why this is STILL a multi step process (in 2024!) for the this app app. It's frustrating to use, and takes your mind off of the reading material simply to highlight something. Unbelievable!

Take a lessons from iOS Books app. The experience there is EXACTLY like using a physical highlighter, (drag across text, done!) easy and distracting. They even have five colors and an underline mode that remembers your selection.

And, if it’s so important to you to give a user multiple menu choices after dragging across text, why not have a **highlighting mode** which I assume most people would be in?

OReilly is mostly good, but there are some glaring issues given the cost and the creator. Considering the cost of a yearly subscription and the material is intended for folks in tech, one would expect the tech built for consuming the material to be top notch. It is not. Highlighting in OReilly is infuriating at times. Occasionally a page gets stuck at a scroll position you can’t navigate past without leaving the book. Then, when you return to that book your scroll position resets to the start of the chapter! Such a bad user experience for a company providing access to books about building better products and good user experiences. Eat, or rather read, some of your own dog food!

Most of the time, it’s a good app. However, there are some design choices and bugs that make the user experience really unpleasant.

Bugs:

When I finish downloading a set of videos, for example, the “Introduction to Go Programming”, the playback progress for every video is close to the end. So if I start a lesson, I have to manually slide backward to the very beginning. And when I finish, because the following videos are all close to “finished”, it would just jump through all of them because the autoplay option is set to true.
On the web version, I can clearly see that I have not started the following lessons. However, in OReilly , it’s not the case. I have to manually catch and pause the video before it jumps to the next one.

Unpleasant design:

As for readings, I believe most people grow to read books page by page, left to right or right to left. However, OReilly forces to scroll up and down, with no pagination. That’s rather unnatural and annoying. I mean, we are not scrolling a webpage with a mouse wheel; We are using our finger tip.

No typeface selection is a bummer.

Font size is still not as large as I would like even at its largest. Readable, but not so comfortably in a distance. I need to find where I left off for a second or two, which is not so pleasant.

Once I started doing this it worked extremely well but then I started doing a new course and then suddenly the video paused at a certain moment and it wouldn’t I deleted OReilly redownloaded and even restarted my iPad then I reset my iPad and it still wouldn’t work after that I almost failed this class and now if you can fix the problem the please do it also the layout for the side is horrible fix that too please also I have another thing to say is that please fix the searchingit is not accurate at all

If you can fix all of this I will be happy to use OReilly again as long as it isn’t fixed I won’t recommend OReilly

I’m really grateful that my university grants their students’ free access to this database because this is a treasure trove of knowledge.

My only complaints is the inconsistent categorization. The way that I find content is searching by keyword subject, but the problem that I have found is that some content you would have expected to see in a different category end up showing up in a different category. Sometimes this is understandable because that is what will happen with books that feature broader content which puts the book itself in a grey area for trying to determine what makes one of that book’s covered subjects more representative of what the book is about than the other subjects that were brought up. I can understand why categorizing can be problematic; however, I still feel like people need to be aware that they may miss out on content because some of it might be listed under a different subject than they were expecting.

O’Reilly has always had awesome books, so I love that you can access their full collection with OReilly . However OReilly has a few rather annoying features (or lack thereof):
- It always wants to jump to the next chapter when scrolling a page up. It’s extremely jarring and annoying when you don’t know when the chapter is done and you’re scrolling up just to make it easier to read the next paragraph, then OReilly scrolls everything off screen.
- Dark more is very non-obvious. OReilly should default to using system settings, but allow for manual overrides.

The application improves with every version but it has a long way to go to get to the gold standard of eBook readers: Kindle. A few irritating aspects that still need to be improved:

1. Better synchronization across devices, particularly laptop and mobile devices.
2. Grouping of books in the queue. Safari finally does this based on topics but it would be good to give users control. For example, I may want to read a few books before others. I would love to put it my a separate folder and focus on its contents.
3. Pagination is not good. I understand this is a philosophical issue but I just don’t like one swath of web page for a chapter. Makes it hard to keep track of where one was if I go back to an earlier chapter to look at something or even a different book. Also make synchronization across devices harder. The best way to address philosophical differences is to give the audience the choice rather than forcing ones view as the “truth”.

The book and other collection is very impressive.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a huge fan of safari books online. I use it daily and I really like the platform. Their mobile app just needs a few slight improvements to be a truly polished gem. Having asetting that can sync dark mode with the system dark mode would be nice. Being able to search downloaded books would also be a good feature. And maybe having a feature to request titles to be added to the O’Reilly media library would be nice as well (rather than just sending the super team an email). Other than that, this is a great platform to keep your skills relevant and to to date in the IT space.

One star out of frustration, otherwise a good app. There’s a long-standing problem with downloads content, where at some point you can’t open the content, whether book or video. You get a red exclamation mark, re-download, and repeat. The only solution is to delete the download, find the content again, and re-download.

With the latest release, I can’t even find the downloads to delete them. So I guess I’m simply locked out of that content until O’Reilly learns to test their UX designs before releasing them.

Again, frustration talking.

I love OReilly. I d love the this app Safari library subscription but this is an app review so all I can say is that it presents the library material ( both books and video) superbly and dependably. It handles multi gigabyte downloads with ease. The video and book reading controls are intuitive. The controls appear and go away just when you want. Text control is adjustable to just about any eyesight. Great great software here.
* * *
Follow up to original review. This no longer works on my iPad first gen. Software used to work beautifully both movies and book reader. Then they introduced serious bugs. Now at the end of it they dropped support for iOS 9. There was no need to. Things worked beautifully before.d

OReilly is very useful when you have access to the O’Reilly library, great search tools to find books, articles, videos, etc., and then bookmark your favorites into playlists.
My only frustration is with the reader, which is very erratic. For example you would expect the most recently read book to open at the more recently read page the next mornings, but the actual page is a toss.
Even turning the iPad orientation while looking at a table sometimes kicks me off to tens of pages away.

Great app but really hard to download content for offline. Most of the time the downloads hang forever after a few seconds. Pausing it and resuming often leads to a corrupted file, or even freeze and crash OReilly . I have this problem on both my iPhone XS and iPad Pro 2018 and the customer service was unfortunately not very helpful. They told me to uninstall and reinstall OReilly , which didn't fix it. This happen on both mobile or wifi connection and I can confirm that my internet connection isn't the problem (good latency and bandwidth, no pb to download netflix content, etc.) This seems like a bad implementation of the network stack of OReilly .

Update Jan 10: App doesn't open anymore, get stuck at login. Had to uninstall and reinstall one more time. And to redownload all the contents :(

I really hope O’Reilly is around for a really long time. This portal is an absolute must if you want to grow in your career and advance your skills. They have ALL the technology (and others) books you’ll ever need and want! When I need a paper copy I check it out at O’Reilly first to decide if I want it. Most of my books though are digital copies there and I read them on my IPad. They have sandboxes for learning environments, live conference access, certification training books and courses; live and on demand, and more. OReilly is solid rarely have any issues. I started with a paid work subscription from work 11 years ago; as soon as it expired I got my own out of pocket and have had it ever since. It’s one of the best investments I have made for my continuing education; try it and I’m sure you’ll think so too. Thank you O’Reilly team!!