There seems to be a big trend toward authors publishing programming books for free online and offering hard copies that you buy, too. In general, if someone offers me a free product and a paid one, I'll stick with free. No surprise there. But coding books are an interesting exception.
I find it much easier to learn a new language when I'm using a book instead of reading it for free online. A book is a single-purpose device; you can only use it to learn about one topic, or set of topics. It doesn't vibrate, notify me of emails and text or encourage me to go on other tangents. For a goal such as learning R or Haskell, which requires a lot of mental energy, having this extra focus makes a big difference.
It's easier to focus and learn on dead trees. For the author it's an interesting model too. Posting online, especially "beta" versions, gets you fast feedback and ultimately a better book. The paper sales are essentially a tip mechanism.
I am not allowed to sell "Mature Optimization" because it's owned by my former employer, but I had some nice bound copies made as gifts for people who come to talks.
I agree, but i've noticed that digital books have code typos too. Now, there are authors that will update them to do fixes. Some hard copies have online section that you can go and download "fixed" pages.
An awesome list! I saw this list on stack overflow before it was transferred to Github. It really does save you loads of time as compared to searching for books using Google.
As with most meta-topical lists, there is virtually
no profit in browsing through it. Time may be wasted
a-plenty, though.
Bring a question about technology X with you, go straight
to section X and then consult with the search engine of
your choice (or a hacker friend, idealy) which book to
actually read.
Hint: some of those have wikipedia-pages, like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-Order_Perl
and others hide the books behind an email
signup front
(one is a strong signal for quality, the other, perhaps,
not so much).
Totally agree,
Btw, HOP is coming just after SICP in my favourites. Great that you mentioned it :). It's great way of seeing same concepts applied to more day to day stuff like html parsing, walking directories, or regexps.
If the certificate has been revoked (as it should be if it is older than a day), it is actually Firefox that is working fine in this context. Probably heartbleed fallout.
I was getting OCSP validation issues on kernel.org today. Turning off OCSP validation, visit kernel.org, then turning it back on seems to solve the issue.
Dumb question here: Any way to maybe download all the PDF/HTML books in one big collection? I could imagine it being pretty huge, but I might interested in downloading it.
It wouldn't be a bad thing to repost it every now and again. Which reminds me, people are as burried in bookmarks as they are in email. Solution = new startup?
Definitely not a bad idea to repost good links. A solution could be a startup, but that's just producing another bookmarking system and reinventing the wheel. I guess that's why there is search on HN.
I would like to propose for a solution to this. To avoid reposts, why doesn't HN create a "Sticky" of good resources like these? It would definitely reduce reposts and also act as a "Go to" link for X(Technology/Tool/Books).
Everyday new people find out about HN and having a link where people can refer to for "typical HN" FAQ's would be great. Just my $0.02.
It's not clear to me what the policy is on links to copyright violating offers, e.g., "jQuery: Novice to Ninja: New Kicks and Tricks - SitePoint". SitePoint.com is currently asking $29 for that eBook, and graciously appears not to be applying DRM. Unfortunately, the phrase "really free" in CONTRIBUTING.md does not really resolve the question.
Does this github project handle the scenario where some of the URLs become dead links or some of the domains expire?
Automatically, these links/domains need not be shown to the user.
I'm not sure that's true. Books can create a DRY problem. When a project moves fast enough, any books written about it have a short window during which they're relevant. After which time they can do as much harm as good, between the info being out of date, or wrong, causing confusion with new developers, diverting them from the official docs, etc.
Flask is pretty small and simple, so books are less necessary than they would be for other types of projects. As long as its own documentation remains good that's going to be the best option.
Really, the hard part about writing an emulator is getting the documentation on the system you are trying to emulate. What console are you trying to write an emulator for?
wow, great link thanks for that, i wish they were exportable to PDF, i too prefer physical (paper) books, but was given an e-reader for xmas and have been reading lots of pdf's on it.
I'm moving over to MongoDB (NoSQL), but an EXTREMELY awesome book that I have in my collection is SQL Hacks. It's published by O'Reilly. It's an extremely awesome book on optimizing SQL queries appropriately. It's not in this list, but I definitely recommend it!!!!
I find it much easier to learn a new language when I'm using a book instead of reading it for free online. A book is a single-purpose device; you can only use it to learn about one topic, or set of topics. It doesn't vibrate, notify me of emails and text or encourage me to go on other tangents. For a goal such as learning R or Haskell, which requires a lot of mental energy, having this extra focus makes a big difference.