Although O'Reilly concentrated mainly on the UNIX market for years, the rise of Internet has shot such titles as Learning Perl and Programming Perl to cult status.

FORBES: Dummy books are for dummies

Open-source programs across the board - the Apache Web server, the Perl programming language and the GNU development tool set, to name a few - are gaining legitimacy as a business platform.

CNN: Celebrated freeware OS Linux grows up

The "Nutshell series" of books is head and shoulders above any other series of programming reference series, covering Perl, CGI, Java, JavaScript.

FORBES: Dummy books are for dummies