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New Look for Search Results
In response to many requests from Safari Subscribers, we have upgraded the Search Results page. We have folded the former view-by-book and view-by-section results into one view, combining the best of both. Each title - book, video, Rough Cut or Short Cut - is displayed only once (like the former view-by-book view), with a snippet of text from the most relevant section (like the former view-by-section view). You can click on "more results from this book" link to see additional relevant sections from the title.
When you conduct a search, you will also notice that your results are now available from four tabs: Books, Videos, Safari Guides, and Articles.
Below is an example of the top books in a search for ruby.
Clicking the Videos tab, you see the top videos found in the same search.
Further, you can now narrow and focus searches by inserting additional terms. In the example below, the user has added rails to the original search for ruby and the list of titles has reduced from 518 to 132. You can continue to narrow the search results by adding more search terms. Also, you can step back to a previous point in your search by clicking a previous search term in the breadcrumb listing of search terms.
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Safari Books Online Named 2008 JOLT Productivity Award Winner
Safari Books Online was chosen as a 2008 Jolt Product Excellence Awards finalist and Productivity Winner in the Web Sites/Developer
Networks category. We are excited that Safari is included in this group of products that are "ahead of the curve, universally useful,
simple yet rich in functionality, or that have solved a nagging problem in their product space." And, every book listed as a finalist
in the Technical Books category, and half of the books in the General Books category, are available through Safari!
These include Beautiful Code, Head First SQL,
The Rails Way, and WPF Unleashed.
For the past 17 years, the Dr. Dobb's Jolt Product Excellence Awards have been presented annually to showcase products that have "jolted"
the IT industry with their significance and made the task of creating software faster, easier, and more efficient. We are proud to have
been recognized by the industry and to become a part of this prestigious group of products and companies.
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Safari Labs
The Safari Labs page has been refreshed and redesigned! The goal of the labs page is to let you play with prototypes or betas of new features. Safari Labs is the place where user collaboration and engagement is strongly encouraged. Hearing from users early on in the development process will help deliver those features from which users gain the most value.
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Nested SearchNow you can narrow your list of search results. The new Nested Search feature enables you to narrow the focus of a search progressively - by adding more specific terms to the query. We experimented with this feature on Safari Labs over the past year. Because we received many positive responses from subscribers, we have now added this powerful search feature to the full site. |
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Safari New Features and EnhancementsSafari has made many improvements to help increase
your productivity and enhance your overall experience.
We know that you come to Safari to access reliable information
and to find solutions to your questions.
We listen to feedback from our users and, as a result,
have added enhancements to make your experience even better
than before. Here are some important improvements and features: |
Page Turning Made Easy
Now you can turn pages without scrolling to the top or
bottom of the page. Simply click the gray borders along either
side margin to flip instantly from page to page.
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Improved PDF Readability and Downloading
When you download chapters in PDF, you will notice a number
of layout and formatting improvements.
You will see improved font choices and larger font sizes.
More of the page is devoted to the text you want to read,
while headers and footers are more concise.
Effective use of white space on the page makes the PDFs
more readable.
Finally, downloading chapters now goes more quickly.
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Tell Us What You Think
We are continually making changes as a result of
listening to our users. Please tell us what you like and
what you'd like us to change by giving us
your feedback.
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Additional Safari Features |
Faster Page Refresh
Using Ajax, Safari serves pages faster and more efficiently,
giving priority to core page components that need to be refreshed first.
For example, when you click on the "Previous" or "Next" buttons inside a book,
you should notice that the core book content arrives prior to anything
else.
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Choices on Log-in
You get to choose where you go after you log in, including going back
to the last page you were reading.
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Suggested Search
As you type your search terms Safari will suggest, in real time,
expressions from the most popular searches our users have entered.
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Convenient Access to Advanced Search Parameters
A new dropdown provides access to filtering on book titles, section titles,
code fragments, author, ISBN and publisher.
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Front-matter Content Freely Viewable
For users with bookshelf-limited accounts, front-matter content, such as the preface and introduction, is now freely
viewable, whether or not the book is on your bookshelf.
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More Contextual Preview from Search
In search results, if you are in "view-by-section" mode,
we provide a more contextual navigation from the search snippet to its
associated content. If the book isn't yet on your bookshelf, there is
a one-to-one linkage between text seen in the snippet and the preview
inside the book. Instead of going to the top few paragraphs of the section,
we'll take you to the same content seen in the snippet. The preview has also
been expanded to show more content.
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Improvements to "Additional Reading" links
When you click on an "Additional reading" link (found at the bottom of book
content pages), the destination section is now viewable in full. You no
longer get only the limited preview if the book isn't on your bookshelf.
In addition, the links no longer reference the same book you're currently
reading, and you can even turn the additional reading block off and on.
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