When tracking down technical information to solve a problem, I turn to the same source most of you do: Google. It's amazing how often simply searching Google for the symptoms of my problem yields a solution. Google is less useful, however, when I'm looking for background information about a new technology or programming technique, leaving me to filter through a huge amount of useless fluff to find the nugget of knowledge I seek. The problem is that Google indexes too much — both the good info and the vast amount of bad info floating in forums and self-published blog manifestos.

For the last year, I've been using an alternative information source that is much more focused, and which I've found is much better at delivering on-topic information when I'm just trying to get the lay of the land. That resource is O'Reilly Associates' Safari Books Online (safari.oreilly.com), which provides full-text access to thousands of technical books from O'Reilly and several other major publishers.

You purchase Safari access through one of several subscription plans. The cheapest plan costs a few dollars per month and lets you access a few books at a time each month. The most expensive plan lets you read the entire collection at will. I started out with the minimal plan but quickly found the all-you-can-eat option cost effective for my work. Safari has a very powerful interface, letting you search across all available titles with numerous advanced categorization options. You can also progressively narrow a search by scanning only previous search results. The service has scads of other useful features that you can check out on your own.

To give you an idea of Safari's utility, I kept a one-week diary of my usage — safari in Safari, as it were. Read on to see if any of my experiences intrigue you.

Monday. A project requires that I build several small servers out of raw parts to quickly test some network configurations. I find Bruce Thompson's Building the Perfect PC, which turns out to be the perfect guide to assembling a bevy of PCs within my tight $1,000 budget. After a quick trip to Frys Electronics, I've got the parts and am cheerfully constructing systems I am confident will work, thanks to Bruce.

One of the systems must run Solaris, an OS I'm a little rusty on. Janice Winsor's Solaris Operating Environment System Administrator's Guide makes quick work of that task. I discover I need to write a Unix shell script to automate some of the configuration. Shell scripts can be tedious to write, but I find just the one I need in Carl Albing's, et al, Bash Cookbook.

Tuesday. For an article, I must construct a somewhat complex illustration. I'm not an expert at Adobe Illustrator and quickly get bogged down just trying to understand the interface. I download Deke McClelland's Illustrator CS3 One-on-One videos and skim through them to get the essentials of Illustrator in my head. I'm suddenly much more productive and complete the drawing in an hour.

An Ajax application I'm working on breaks when the users press the Back button in the browser. Searching on "ajax back button" leads me to Bruce Perry's Ajax Hacks, which tells me exactly what the problem is and how to fix it. Sweet. The same application has to use ODBC to access a PostgreSQL database. Korry Douglas's, et al, PostgreSQL tells me how to pull that rabbit out of my hat.

Wednesday. The Unix servers I built on Monday must replicate an i5/OS DB2 database. Raul Chong's, et al, Understanding DB2: Learning Visually with Examples walks me through installing and configuring DB2 on Linux, and Safari's clever Additional Reading feature directs me to Tom Bauch's, et al, DB2 for Solaris to handle the Solaris installation.

One of my handmade servers must act as a firewall. I'm a complete newbie on server-based firewalls, but Michael Rash's Linux Firewalls quickly fills me in, and I've got a firewall running in nothing flat.

Thursday. I'm tasked to reproduce the entire hand-built server network I've constructed as virtualized machines on a single physical server. That's a tall order, but since these are virtually (sorry) all Unix machines, I think I can get by with the open-source Xen virtualization. Jenna Mathews' Running Xen: A Hands-on Guide to the Art of Virtualization looks like just the ticket. Alas, it's not scheduled for publication for a few months. Fortunately, Safari's Rough Cuts feature lets me read the manuscript in-progress. Although the book is only partially completed, Jenna has already written the parts I need — in particular, how to get Solaris running under Xen Domain0.

The Xen I'm running uses the venerable Emacs text editor. Time to relearn EMacs, which I do in short order with Debra Cameron's GNU Emacs Pocket Reference. I spend one of my accumulated Safari PDF tokens to print out a cheat sheet from the book.

Friday. I spend the morning troubleshooting a network performance problem using the open-source Wireshark program. Alas, the program is short on documentation. I find Chris Sanders' Practical Packet Analysis, which not only teaches me new Wireshark tricks but also gives me some clues about what might be slowing down the network. In a few hours, I've solved a problem I might otherwise have spent weeks tracking down.

At lunchtime a friend needs to move his Joomla content-management system from his physical server to a virtual appliance. I've never used Joomla, but Barrie North has; his Joomla! A User's Guide speeds me through the process.

After lunch, I realize that I'm caught up on all my tasks for the week, or at least nobody will be bugging me for answers until Monday. I decide to scan the Safari Just Added list of new titles. Several look interesting: a slew of new For Dummies books that might apply to me, a Rough Cut version of James Harmon's Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library, and John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. I print browser window excerpts of each for future reference (Safari permits unlimited browser printing).

Wait. One last thing to end the week: finishing my guest viewpoint column for System iNEWS. I reformat my diary for publication and tally up my potential savings: I've accessed $448 worth of books and videos for a little over $10 and searched the full text of thousands of other books. Plus, I've saved hours culling through Google results that wouldn't have met my needs. Safari's Rough Cuts gave me the inside track on some critical information that undoubtedly saved me a few more hours. I figure I can take the next week off.

Mel Beckman is a senior technical editor for System iNEWS.