By having online access to all of Sebastopol, Calif.-based Safari's books, Sun employees can access topical IT information immediately, and can search across every book in the collection to find the information they're seeking, Hill said. "That's one of the great benefits of this," she said. "You never know where you're going to find the information, so it's that serendipitous moment of discovery. It provides targeted, vetted information that's highly germane to the engineers' jobs."

Previously, Sun employees had to check out books in print from the Sun library or purchase them ahead of time to be able to use them. Then they had to carry them around, which could be difficult if the book was a heavy, 400-page technical manual. "This doesn't replace physical books, but gives them both" to use, Hill said. Sun's employee library includes about 10,000 printed books spread out in two locations in the company's Santa Clara, Calif.-based headquarters and at its Burlington, Mass.-based campus.

Among the most popular topics searched by Sun workers using the online books are Solaris, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby and AJAX.

As part of its contract with Safari, Sun also signed up for Safari's 1,000 business and management books online, giving workers access to improve other skills, "because engineers are also managers -- they're project managers and people managers," Hill said.

Safari, a joint venture of O'Reilly Media Inc. and Pearson Education, provides a fully searchable database of the electronic versions of books from a wide range of publishers, including Addison-Wesley Professional, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, New Riders, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall PTR, Sun Microsystems Press, Que and Sams.