5 ms·

Take note that this list seems to include any book, regardless of how old it is and how bad its contents are now, 10+ years later. Before investing time in any

Take note that this list seems to include any book, regardless of how old it is and how bad its contents are now, 10+ years later. Before investing time in any of these, do yourself, and the world, a favor and find the community of the language and ask them if the book you found on that list is shit.

gortok 10y ago
Hard to have a voting mechanism on Github. Stack Overflow isn't really suited for this either. They try to do it with this question, but even that is hard to do: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-b...
kelukelugames 10y ago
I agree this needs to be better organized or curated. Cobbling together 2000 lines of books is not the easiest to consume.
- daheza 10y ago
  Probably an easy way to do it, would be to run the book title through hacker news comments and programming language subreddits. Count up the number of references. That at least would give you an idea of how often a book is mentioned.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    You'd need to normalize against the age, since some books have over 20 years of recommendations despite having been outdated 18 years ago.
shangxiao 10y ago
Yes this is why I personally avoid such lists. Take for eg the Django books: anything below 1.8 is officially unsupported and you should definitely not be learning. A quick question on #django on freenode about best learning resource and people will always reply with "first, the official tutorial, then maybe django-girls tutorials"
sotojuan 10y ago
This is my gripe with laundry list GitHub repos (see most "awesome-X" repos). People just make them for the stars and "fame" and have no intention of curating or reviewing.
- gedrap 10y ago
  Totally agree with you on this point (not the OP's link specifically, but the awesome-x trend in general), too many of them add craploads of crappy links just for the sake of a high number. Maybe it's just that my learning style is different from the majority's but I don't see much benefit in a massive dump of links. The idea and the intention of a community curated list on learning resources is good and lovely, it's just that github is not suitable for this.
  - vhf 10y ago
    I agree with you: github is not suitable for this. When I created this github repo, it was because stack overflow wasn't suitable for this. Then I created a website (the now defunkt resrc.io) which could pull these kind of lists from github, parse the links, have them tagged in a database, parse the link content, make it searchable, etc. It still wasn't suitable. And I'm still looking for a suitable way of curating such lists, be it on github or anywhere else.
    - gedrap 10y ago
      I checked the link from the archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140701160526/http://resrc.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140701160526/http://resrc.io/ and from what I can see, it looks like the main issue (vetting of the links) wasn't really solved. That's the main issue with the awesome-x, from my perspective. Most of the people don't really need to read 5 books on basic Python, nor have the time to do so (trying to read a few books and dropping some is also time consuming). Having tons of options sometimes seems cool when just checking or looking around, but when you actually need to use/learn something it's usually much better to have a couple (at most) of vetted resources that you can trust. Especially for the basic things, where there are countless of books, blog series, online courses. The paradox of choice, sort of. That would actually take 'community curated' to the next level. The way I imagine this format working is having lists and sublists (loosely made of awesome-x repos) and each link having a upvote/downvote/report button. While the voting system would reside outside the github, every link could in github could have a widget next to it, similar to build status widgets. Well, you could implement voting using issues and reactions but that seems like a really messy way to do something. If widgets with score wouldn't exist, it would be extremely hard to convince the users to go to yet another web site.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fabiogo 10y ago
In that case, it would be helpful to have a Github list of links to language communities for quick reference.
agumonkey 10y ago
Let me add a tiny suggestion: sometimes even old, and obsolete has value. There might be an intermediate step in the paradigm or exercise that will suit your mind better. For instance: I failed twice at the calculating change problem in courses (Coursera, SICP). I find a variant in an old Caml problems book, that made me able to revisit the change problem and solve it on my own. Seek for stimulation and keep growing. Cheers.
- krivx 10y ago
  Totally agree, and I'll piggyback this to say that the quality is not always too important either. Worrying about whether the book you are learning from is "the best" is not as productive as getting on with learning the language. A book really only has to good enough not to teach bad habits or explain concepts incorrectly.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Recently read the phrase 'don't optimizing for comfort'.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    75% of all Perl books teach bad habits and explain things incorrectly. I didn't use the word "shit" up there lightly.
    - krivx 10y ago
      I guess Perl is kind of a special case :) I got up to speed by reading half of some fairly old Perl book, then reading most of Modern Perl.
      - Mithaldu 10y ago
        You'd be guessing badly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12036826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12036826 I've also had similar experiences with Java, nevermind Javascript. It is an utter and simple fact that due to tech being an everchanging landscape, any book more than a few years old is going to teach bad habits or explain concepts incorrectly.

gortok 10y ago

Hard to have a voting mechanism on Github. Stack Overflow isn't really suited for this either. They try to do it with this question, but even that is hard to do: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-b...

kelukelugames 10y ago

I agree this needs to be better organized or curated. Cobbling together 2000 lines of books is not the easiest to consume.

daheza 10y ago
Probably an easy way to do it, would be to run the book title through hacker news comments and programming language subreddits. Count up the number of references. That at least would give you an idea of how often a book is mentioned.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  You'd need to normalize against the age, since some books have over 20 years of recommendations despite having been outdated 18 years ago.

shangxiao 10y ago

Yes this is why I personally avoid such lists. Take for eg the Django books: anything below 1.8 is officially unsupported and you should definitely not be learning. A quick question on #django on freenode about best learning resource and people will always reply with "first, the official tutorial, then maybe django-girls tutorials"

sotojuan 10y ago

This is my gripe with laundry list GitHub repos (see most "awesome-X" repos). People just make them for the stars and "fame" and have no intention of curating or reviewing.

gedrap 10y ago
Totally agree with you on this point (not the OP's link specifically, but the awesome-x trend in general), too many of them add craploads of crappy links just for the sake of a high number. Maybe it's just that my learning style is different from the majority's but I don't see much benefit in a massive dump of links. The idea and the intention of a community curated list on learning resources is good and lovely, it's just that github is not suitable for this.
- vhf 10y ago
  I agree with you: github is not suitable for this. When I created this github repo, it was because stack overflow wasn't suitable for this. Then I created a website (the now defunkt resrc.io) which could pull these kind of lists from github, parse the links, have them tagged in a database, parse the link content, make it searchable, etc. It still wasn't suitable. And I'm still looking for a suitable way of curating such lists, be it on github or anywhere else.
  - gedrap 10y ago
    I checked the link from the archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140701160526/http://resrc.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140701160526/http://resrc.io/ and from what I can see, it looks like the main issue (vetting of the links) wasn't really solved. That's the main issue with the awesome-x, from my perspective. Most of the people don't really need to read 5 books on basic Python, nor have the time to do so (trying to read a few books and dropping some is also time consuming). Having tons of options sometimes seems cool when just checking or looking around, but when you actually need to use/learn something it's usually much better to have a couple (at most) of vetted resources that you can trust. Especially for the basic things, where there are countless of books, blog series, online courses. The paradox of choice, sort of. That would actually take 'community curated' to the next level. The way I imagine this format working is having lists and sublists (loosely made of awesome-x repos) and each link having a upvote/downvote/report button. While the voting system would reside outside the github, every link could in github could have a widget next to it, similar to build status widgets. Well, you could implement voting using issues and reactions but that seems like a really messy way to do something. If widgets with score wouldn't exist, it would be extremely hard to convince the users to go to yet another web site.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

fabiogo 10y ago

In that case, it would be helpful to have a Github list of links to language communities for quick reference.

agumonkey 10y ago

Let me add a tiny suggestion: sometimes even old, and obsolete has value. There might be an intermediate step in the paradigm or exercise that will suit your mind better. For instance: I failed twice at the calculating change problem in courses (Coursera, SICP). I find a variant in an old Caml problems book, that made me able to revisit the change problem and solve it on my own. Seek for stimulation and keep growing. Cheers.

krivx 10y ago
Totally agree, and I'll piggyback this to say that the quality is not always too important either. Worrying about whether the book you are learning from is "the best" is not as productive as getting on with learning the language. A book really only has to good enough not to teach bad habits or explain concepts incorrectly.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Recently read the phrase 'don't optimizing for comfort'.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  75% of all Perl books teach bad habits and explain things incorrectly. I didn't use the word "shit" up there lightly.
  - krivx 10y ago
    I guess Perl is kind of a special case :) I got up to speed by reading half of some fairly old Perl book, then reading most of Modern Perl.
    - Mithaldu 10y ago
      You'd be guessing badly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12036826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12036826 I've also had similar experiences with Java, nevermind Javascript. It is an utter and simple fact that due to tech being an everchanging landscape, any book more than a few years old is going to teach bad habits or explain concepts incorrectly.