You can read Effective Perl Programming in the Safari Books Online mobile site, and it looks pretty nice. One of the advantages of Safari Books Online is that you don’t have to buy individual books. You have access to all of the books for a subscription fee. It’s even better if you get your company to buy an enterprise subscription for you and everyone you work with.
The mobile site has a much cleaner look than the regular version of the main website, and unfortunately it detects desktop browsers and redirects you to the more cluttered site. Apparently, you can’t fake that with a user agent tool, such as User Agent Switcher for Firefox (if you figure out how and post it here, I’ll send you the paper version of Effective Perl Programming for free). Still, it looks quite nice on iPhone and iPad.
Safari Books online mobile site on the iPhone 4, showing Item 13
The iPhone version will do in a pinch, but the iPad version is much more usable and enjoyable to use, even if the Retina Display gives them almost the same resolution which is why the screenshot sizes look out of proportion:
Safari Books online mobile site on the iPad, showing Item 13
I’m curious how this looks on other devices. I’m not an Apple bigot, and I know many of you are probably using Android devices. Send me those screenshots and I’ll add them. I expect they’ll look mostly the same, though.
I’m not sure how O’Reilly is detecting the browser, since they seem to ignore both the user agent and the x-wap-profile.
However, you can turn off JavaScript when visiting and you will get the mobile login page.