8 ms·

Free Programing Books

195 points by fmfamaral 11mo ago

OutOfHere 11mo ago
It's not a good list because each book's year is not noted. Also, ideally the books would be reverse sorted by year. Older books become obsolete quickly.
piskov 11mo ago
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later.
- blackhaj7 11mo ago
  Nice! Taleb calls it the anti-library
  - yulker 11mo ago
    Spiritually different intention, but both yield lots of unread material at hand. The parent's is "bought with best intentions" but letting it pile up despite that intention, Taleb's is purposefully accumulating material that you don't intend to read unless a future you finds it helpful to explore that book
    - treetalker 11mo ago
      Research tool!
    - f1shy 11mo ago
      This is what I do. When I see a free PDF that seems well written, or was suggested to me, I save it in the bucket “maybe someday I might need that” but l know I will 99% never read. My experience is that it is useful. At least 10 books that were deep in that bucket were useful for me, and ended reading them. I must have 10000 though.
      - dotancohen 11mo ago
        The time is not far where you'll be able to train an LLM on them, which will then present to you the information as you need it.
- dunham 11mo ago
  do pdfs count? % mdfind -onlyin ~ kind:pdf |wc -l 11116 (2k of those are in my directory of github checkouts and there are duplicates in there.)
  - ternaryoperator 11mo ago
    Why do you make PDFs of github checkouts?
    - dunham 11mo ago
      I meant that I have repositories checked out of github that contain pdf files. Most repositories that I check out of github are in ~/code, which I back up in case it disappears upstream. But it does look like a lot of those files actually are academic papers.
  - mindcrime 11mo ago
    They totally do! And epub, mobi, djvu... prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.pdf" | wc -l 18952 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.epub" | wc -l 2385 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.djvu" | wc -l 1384 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.mobi" | wc -l 125 (There are definitely duplicates in those, FWIW)
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
      Why are you downloading mobi files? Seriously, I only do that if there is no epub, and only keep it long enough to convert it.
      - mindcrime 11mo ago
        Pretty much that. If the only copy I can find is .mobi.. or, occasionally perhaps, just by mistake.
  - dotancohen 11mo ago
- pessimizer 11mo ago
  I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in, like your bookshelf or ebook directory. The only caveat when it comes to paper is not to buy shit e.g. bestsellers, or software books that you're not going to read and use right away. If you don't buy shit (this is also true with board games and guitars), you can resell likely for about what you paid (or sometimes unexpectedly far more), whenever you want. Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
  - dotancohen 11mo ago
    > I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in That sounds like quite the endorsement for targeted advertising. In a good way - really I would love targeted advertising if it were implemented differently.
    - pessimizer 11mo ago
      Pretty well-established that targeted advertising works better than untargeted advertising, all other things being equal. I think you should put things in your bookshelf or collection of pdfs to hold off FOMO. When you finally get back around to being interested in Bosnian history, the books you wanted might be impossible to get. If you never get back around to it, you can help some stranger out who did. I guess this is becoming less true with the libgens and annas-archives of the world, but when those all disappear on the same day (that seemed like any other), you'll have missed out. I certainly don't miss the days when I spent years waiting for a book to come up on ebay or used.addall.com at a price under $150.
    - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      Targeted ads are great, when it's actually consumer focused. Sadly the nature of modern ads makes it so all the power is taken from the consumer. A proper targeted ad should have the ability to say to it "I never want to see yo again", and virtually no advert would ever want that to happen.
geoffbp 11mo ago
Programming*
- fmfamaral 11mo ago
  :\
  - Jtsummers 11mo ago
    If you can't edit it anymore, email the mods. Their contact is at the bottom of the page.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
globular-toast 11mo ago
So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you. Try getting hard copies of some books you think you should read. Personally I can never read text books on screens, but I devour them in paper format.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
  Books are among the smallest (complete) media I own. Even a single album weighs in heavier than all but my largest books, and even with the largest those only just barely exceed the smallest of albums. They're easy to store, I won't later want a "higher resolution" book. Easy to organize (and it will only become easier... I expect technology/software that will allow better indexing in the near future). The books I keep now can become my family's library, shared and copied as my family becomes larger and more distant in the future. Immune from DRM or copyright regulations, invisible to anti-piracy efforts, and ever growing. They don't even print the books I'd want on the kinds of paper that would last more than 20 years, and I can't afford the sort of museum-level-preservation effort it would require to take advantage of that supposing they did.
- mandeepj 11mo ago
  > So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you. I think if you can convert them into audio, then they'd have a better chance of getting consumed while doing an activity like cooking, working out, or walking. I find it hard now to find dedicated time for just reading a book.
  - mandeepj 11mo ago
    can't believe sharing a personal learning experience would hurt someone! Snowflakes!!
Qem 11mo ago
The Pharo site has a section with several free books on the language: https://books.pharo.org/ https://books.pharo.org/
mystraline 11mo ago
If you head to libgen.ac, you can find nearly every book. Sure, its a 'pirate library'. But seriously, if public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would be banned as well. And that's also not saying anything about the AI companies, both targeting everything they can get their mitts on.
- kjs3 11mo ago
  Go to libgen.ac. Searched for '68030', because I'm playing with one. Zero books found. So, no, far less than "nearly every book".
  - mystraline 11mo ago
    https://libgen.li/index.php?req=68030&columns%5B%5D=t&columns%5B%5D=a&columns%5B%5D=s&columns%5B%5D=y&columns%5B%5D=p&columns%5B%5D=i&objects%5B%5D=f&objects%5B%5D=e&objects%5B%5D=s&objects%5B%5D=a&objects%5B%5D=p&objects%5B%5D=w&topics%5B%5D=l&topics%5B%5D=c&topics%5B%5D=f&topics%5B%5D=a&topics%5B%5D=m&topics%5B%5D=r&topics%5B%5D=s&res=100&filesuns=all https://libgen.li/index.php?req=68030&columns%5B%5D=t&column... So, libgen.li .
    - kjs3 11mo ago
      That search returns 10 items. I own more physical copies of 68030 related books than that search returns. Bonus: none of those 10 items are books. I'll stick to Anna's or the rest that actually index useful stuff.
AfterHIA 11mo ago
A few more that young developers need to read: Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dream_Machines.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr... Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them." https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed... Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing." https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics." https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdf https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel... Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsTheatre.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe... Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful. https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11 Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?
InMice 11mo ago
Good list. Would be nice to add more metadata like publication year
vram22 11mo ago
Code Complete by Steve McConnell is a very good one. Edn. 1 is better than Edn. 2. All, IMO.

195 points by fmfamaral 11mo ago

It's not a good list because each book's year is not noted. Also, ideally the books would be reverse sorted by year. Older books become obsolete quickly.

piskov 11mo ago

Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later.

blackhaj7 11mo ago
Nice! Taleb calls it the anti-library
- yulker 11mo ago
  Spiritually different intention, but both yield lots of unread material at hand. The parent's is "bought with best intentions" but letting it pile up despite that intention, Taleb's is purposefully accumulating material that you don't intend to read unless a future you finds it helpful to explore that book
  - treetalker 11mo ago
    Research tool!
  - f1shy 11mo ago
    This is what I do. When I see a free PDF that seems well written, or was suggested to me, I save it in the bucket “maybe someday I might need that” but l know I will 99% never read. My experience is that it is useful. At least 10 books that were deep in that bucket were useful for me, and ended reading them. I must have 10000 though.
    - dotancohen 11mo ago
      The time is not far where you'll be able to train an LLM on them, which will then present to you the information as you need it.
dunham 11mo ago
do pdfs count? % mdfind -onlyin ~ kind:pdf |wc -l 11116 (2k of those are in my directory of github checkouts and there are duplicates in there.)
- ternaryoperator 11mo ago
  Why do you make PDFs of github checkouts?
  - dunham 11mo ago
    I meant that I have repositories checked out of github that contain pdf files. Most repositories that I check out of github are in ~/code, which I back up in case it disappears upstream. But it does look like a lot of those files actually are academic papers.
- mindcrime 11mo ago
  They totally do! And epub, mobi, djvu... prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.pdf" | wc -l 18952 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.epub" | wc -l 2385 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.djvu" | wc -l 1384 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.mobi" | wc -l 125 (There are definitely duplicates in those, FWIW)
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
    Why are you downloading mobi files? Seriously, I only do that if there is no epub, and only keep it long enough to convert it.
    - mindcrime 11mo ago
      Pretty much that. If the only copy I can find is .mobi.. or, occasionally perhaps, just by mistake.
- dotancohen 11mo ago
pessimizer 11mo ago
I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in, like your bookshelf or ebook directory. The only caveat when it comes to paper is not to buy shit e.g. bestsellers, or software books that you're not going to read and use right away. If you don't buy shit (this is also true with board games and guitars), you can resell likely for about what you paid (or sometimes unexpectedly far more), whenever you want. Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  > I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in That sounds like quite the endorsement for targeted advertising. In a good way - really I would love targeted advertising if it were implemented differently.
  - pessimizer 11mo ago
    Pretty well-established that targeted advertising works better than untargeted advertising, all other things being equal. I think you should put things in your bookshelf or collection of pdfs to hold off FOMO. When you finally get back around to being interested in Bosnian history, the books you wanted might be impossible to get. If you never get back around to it, you can help some stranger out who did. I guess this is becoming less true with the libgens and annas-archives of the world, but when those all disappear on the same day (that seemed like any other), you'll have missed out. I certainly don't miss the days when I spent years waiting for a book to come up on ebay or used.addall.com at a price under $150.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Targeted ads are great, when it's actually consumer focused. Sadly the nature of modern ads makes it so all the power is taken from the consumer. A proper targeted ad should have the ability to say to it "I never want to see yo again", and virtually no advert would ever want that to happen.

geoffbp 11mo ago

Programming*

fmfamaral 11mo ago
:\
- Jtsummers 11mo ago
  If you can't edit it anymore, email the mods. Their contact is at the bottom of the page.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

globular-toast 11mo ago

So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you. Try getting hard copies of some books you think you should read. Personally I can never read text books on screens, but I devour them in paper format.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
Books are among the smallest (complete) media I own. Even a single album weighs in heavier than all but my largest books, and even with the largest those only just barely exceed the smallest of albums. They're easy to store, I won't later want a "higher resolution" book. Easy to organize (and it will only become easier... I expect technology/software that will allow better indexing in the near future). The books I keep now can become my family's library, shared and copied as my family becomes larger and more distant in the future. Immune from DRM or copyright regulations, invisible to anti-piracy efforts, and ever growing. They don't even print the books I'd want on the kinds of paper that would last more than 20 years, and I can't afford the sort of museum-level-preservation effort it would require to take advantage of that supposing they did.
mandeepj 11mo ago
> So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you. I think if you can convert them into audio, then they'd have a better chance of getting consumed while doing an activity like cooking, working out, or walking. I find it hard now to find dedicated time for just reading a book.
- mandeepj 11mo ago
  can't believe sharing a personal learning experience would hurt someone! Snowflakes!!

Qem 11mo ago

The Pharo site has a section with several free books on the language: https://books.pharo.org/ https://books.pharo.org/

mystraline 11mo ago

If you head to libgen.ac, you can find nearly every book. Sure, its a 'pirate library'. But seriously, if public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would be banned as well. And that's also not saying anything about the AI companies, both targeting everything they can get their mitts on.

kjs3 11mo ago
Go to libgen.ac. Searched for '68030', because I'm playing with one. Zero books found. So, no, far less than "nearly every book".
- mystraline 11mo ago
  https://libgen.li/index.php?req=68030&columns%5B%5D=t&columns%5B%5D=a&columns%5B%5D=s&columns%5B%5D=y&columns%5B%5D=p&columns%5B%5D=i&objects%5B%5D=f&objects%5B%5D=e&objects%5B%5D=s&objects%5B%5D=a&objects%5B%5D=p&objects%5B%5D=w&topics%5B%5D=l&topics%5B%5D=c&topics%5B%5D=f&topics%5B%5D=a&topics%5B%5D=m&topics%5B%5D=r&topics%5B%5D=s&res=100&filesuns=all https://libgen.li/index.php?req=68030&columns%5B%5D=t&column... So, libgen.li .
  - kjs3 11mo ago
    That search returns 10 items. I own more physical copies of 68030 related books than that search returns. Bonus: none of those 10 items are books. I'll stick to Anna's or the rest that actually index useful stuff.

AfterHIA 11mo ago

A few more that young developers need to read: Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dream_Machines.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr... Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them." https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed.pdf https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed... Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing." https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics." https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdf https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel... Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsTheatre.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe... Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful. https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11 Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?

InMice 11mo ago

Good list. Would be nice to add more metadata like publication year

vram22 11mo ago

Code Complete by Steve McConnell is a very good one. Edn. 1 is better than Edn. 2. All, IMO.