Well, there are a lot of people who love Make: magazine. I've seen other comments that it's the best part of O'Reilly, which we lost when we spun it out in December :-) So tastes may differ.
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hi tim, it's not about taste, the "a perceived downward trend in the quality" is real. i own my career o'reilly. i have a cherished sortiment of 25 or more o'reilly books, some used and read so often that they more look like an original gutenberg bible than a computer book from the nineties/2000s. sadly i couldn't ad a new book to this collection for years.
for a very long time i believed that there was something like the O'Reilly (animal books) standard, that whenever one of your books is read front to cover you a) know more about the topic at hand than 99.9% the rest of the world and b) a deeper understanding of the topic.
while a) might still be true from time to time, b) is not true anymore -because the books are quite bad. and with bad i mean poorly edited (i.e.: the art of SEO, first edition and a lot more), completely un-structured (couchDB first edition), a scam (the one with the cow on the cover, it was the only book i ever did send back to amazon, just found it, it was the Data Source Handbook, 46 pages, 24 EUR, unbelievable poor "content") or just ... not a good book.
whereby i one stood in the computer book section, studied each oreilly book and decided what to learn this month, i now look into the other direction.
whereby i once recommended every dev-rookie every one of your book, i now point them to pragprog.
i believe you are a bussy man, but well, if you would from time to time pick up one of your books, read it front to cover and then ask yourself if this is really a book worth of having your name in front of it, this would already (probably) help a lot.
I don't know about your Railsconf issue. Please send more details.