O'Reilly began by publishing a collection of really good UNIX® manuals, which for a long time were about the only books available on the subject. Later they branched out, and many of their "animal cover" books became de facto documentation standards, particularly "The Camel Book," and "The Rhino Book." Regular customers have become a little spoiled, expecting all O'Reilly books to be the very best available on a particular subject, period. While the continued expansion of the line may have diluted their cachet somewhat, you can still expect extremely high quality from O'Reilly.
O'Reilly has recently become the distributor for eight smaller independent publishers: Manning, PC Publishing, Mandriva, Pragmatic Programmers, SitePoint, No Starch, Paraglyph, and Syngress. It is unclear that this will have any effect on these pages, but it is worth noting.
