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Free Textbooks from Springer, Categorised
- abnry 6y agoThis sort of thing literally brings out the starving aggressive animal in me. I get so frantic trying to download all I can! Very, very surprising to me, one of the free books turns out to be directly related to my new job (like, my boss's PhD advisor wrote the book).
- hnarayanan 6y agoAnd one was written by a mentor of mine who passed away shortly after completing the book. :(
- BossingAround 6y ago> This sort of thing literally brings out the starving aggressive animal in me. I get so frantic trying to download all I can! This feeling is not useful, unless you follow through with your initial impulse and go through all the books. I feel like this feeling is partially what fuels our unsustainable consumerism and growth; we all have it, sadly.
- californical 6y agoI don't think it's necessarily bad -- I collect free ebooks when I can, even if I'm not interested in reading them now but think I might someday. Then, later if I'm thinking about learning Rust (for example), I can go to the free book collection of mine and see if I have anything, then read through them. I've done this a few times. Even if I only get value out of 20% of that collection, I wouldn't have known in advance what 20% I'd eventually be interested in. And I do still pay for physical books too (but I don't stockpile those, and buy them when I actually want to read them)
- BossingAround 6y agoI can see your point. From my perspective, the "let's collect it because what if I need it later" mindset is not wrong at all times, but I think we're selectively blind to those 95% in which case it's a miss (i.e. in our case, you'd download an ebook and forget you even have it in like a week). In ebooks, this doesn't really create a bad outcome, but I think this mindset can manifest in other aspects of our lives as well and that's where it's very much less desirable. It was just an offtopic remark uttered with no judgement, but it's something I've been sensitive in my own attitude.
- psexec 6y agoI collect every book that I come across, and I can't count the number of times it's been helpful (one month, or five years later). It doesn't matter if you can't remember the book after a week, fzf is here to help you. If you got interested in a new topic (like the aforementioned Rust), press Ctrl+T and type "rust". Or you can suppress the impulse and skip getting the book, then either forget the site altogether, or visit it five years later and find that it got shut down four years ago.
- f0ok 6y agoUmberto Eco had quite a library of unread books. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...
- alberto_ol 6y agoeco walking in his personal library https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF9tG5Q6NTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF9tG5Q6NTA
- g-b-r 6y agoAnd I thought that my ~1000 e-books were a record...
- dhosek 6y ago1000 books is really not much. After culling, I have 1000 books on my read shelves and easily 200 or so unread books. And that's just what I have in print and doesn't count the music books or the rare book shelf or my wife's two bookcases of print books.
- g-b-r 6y agoYou're right indeed, maybe in the e-books side it's rarer... Anyway, my wallet felt it, considering I've done most of it in about 4 years with a relatively modest salary
- dhosek 6y agoAfter I got my first job, I went on a bookstore crawl through Santa Monica back when the Third Street Promenade was full of independent shops and bookstores. I came home with a car full of books and a thousand-dollar credit card bill. It's easy to forget that your income is finite when you're young and foolish.
- g-b-r 6y ago
- kubav 6y agoProblem is that you rarely find good books this way so you have pile of books which are not worth reading. Determining which books are good takes a lot of time. This is reason I have stopped hoarding books from cheap or free sources. It is way better to download/buy/pirate books recommended on the internet than trying to find them myself.
- snakeboy 6y agoA reasonable strategy for me is: 1. Trawl through a resource like this when I come across them 2. If one looks interesting, do a quick google search of "[sub-category] recommended texts for [my-level] level" 3. Buy or Pirate the top recommended text Resources like this serve as good inspiration to learn about something new.
- abnry 6y agoI actually agree it isn't that useful. At least for me. My attitude is that high quality sources are worth more than low quality ones.
- entha_saava 6y agoCan I introduce you to library genesis? Or, if you don't like piracy, upenn's online books Page?
- noir_lord 6y agoThat would definitely be a form of Nerd Sniping[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoUPenn in particular wow great site thank you.
- specialist 6y agoYa. I'm embarrassed by my hoarding behavior. Took me a decade to let go of my CDs, even though I had stopped listening to them much earlier. I've only managed to cull ~1/2 of my physical books. My mitigation strategy for ebooks is quickly adding to my bookmark's "Books" folder and close the tab.
- ghaff 6y agoI used to be much more of a packrat than I am now. I've slowly been winnowing out stuff liked used computer equipment and enough books so that they all fit in my existing bookshelves (more or less). And I've slowly been digitizing more and more things. I'm probably still at least something of a digital packrat but a lot of that is it's just easier to hold onto stuff than expend the mental energy to figure out what to keep and what to delete.
- p0llard 6y agoThe texts Philosophical and Mathematical Logic and Mathematical Logic should probably fall under Mathematics and Statistics rather than Religion and Philosophy, but seems a nice resource otherwise!
- hnarayanan 6y agoOP here. Thank you for pointing this out. I didn’t manually categorise it, just extracted the Springer categories. Will manually review this tomorrow.
- p0llard 6y agoHuh interesting, I'd guess they're basing that on the series the book is published in, which can often be misleading.
- ckcheng 6y ago"Philosophical and Mathematical Logic" is by Harrie de Swart affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University. > Throughout the text, the author provides some impressions of the historical development of logic: Stoic and Aristotelian logic, logic in the Middle Ages and Frege's Begriffsschrift, together with the works of George Boole (1815-1864) and August De Morgan (1806-1871), the origin of modern logic. Those topics feel pretty typical of logic as studied in philosophy depts. I think traditionally, a lot of logicians working with formal or mathematical logic worked out of philosophy departments. I've been told that more recently, a lot of them now work out of Comp Sci departments. There just isn't enough of them in one place to have a Dept of Logic I guess! :) "Mathematical Logic" by Roman Kossak is probably mis-categorized. Topics look like typical math topics. Affiliation is Math Dept at CUNY, Bronx Community College campus. Yeah, probably should be under math section.
- p0llard 6y agoMathematical Logic and Philosophy cross over quite a bit, but I think any text which features proof sketches of Löwenheim–Skolem (present in Philosophical and Mathematical Logic) qualifies as a mathematics text. At any rate the category Religion and Philosophy is wrong, Analytic Philosophy maybe.
- btimar 6y agoNice! I've been meaning to check out "Linear algebra done right" for a while
- nextos 6y agoSadly this is the latest (3rd) edition. IMHO they ruined the beautiful typesetting typical of Springer math books with tons of super distracting boxes. I guess the book is a victim of its own popularity, as other books such as Abbott still keep their old look. My 2 favorite linear algebra books now have broken typesetting. Halmos is too antique, and would benefit greatly from modern LaTeX. Axler is now too flashy.
- sgdpk 6y agoI agree with this! I prefer reading Axler's 2nd edition because it is a lot less distracting.
- salutis 6y agoI did not know that the 2nd edition of the book is typeset in a simple black and white style. Thank you for sharing!
- davidivadavid 6y agoDon't know if I'm the only one with that pet peeve, but a textbook with ugly superfluous boxes is almost reason enough for me to drop it right away. Reminds me too much of all my terrible high school textbooks.
- non-entity 6y agoThere some pretty interesting, weirdly specific subjects in there: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-57883-5 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-57883-5 Also some cool stuff related to some projects I'm working on. Unfortunately I find most textbooks involve a ton of mathematics and notation I'm not familiar with.
- jph 6y agoThank you! Here's your list as a text file, which may be helpful for people who like text. https://gist.github.com/joelparkerhenderson/11dfdb4bdeb3403b6fa3d4de7878bfde https://gist.github.com/joelparkerhenderson/11dfdb4bdeb3403b...
- mathnmusic 6y agoThanks for posting this. I imported all these books into a collection at LearnAwesome.org: https://learnawesome.org/users/8a16a2e4-dcb7-4167-a2a2-51d3af9d1613/collections/6f9b4ec2-9968-432b-86f6-f4c0b66542b3 https://learnawesome.org/users/8a16a2e4-dcb7-4167-a2a2-51d3a...
- tzs 6y agoIn the math books, a gem is "Proofs from THE BOOK" [1]. [1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-662-57265-8 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-662-57265-8
- xkgt 6y agoI just lost my morning skimming through this book. It looks like there are a lot of other good books among this collection. It won't be possible to go through all, but are there are any recommendations from HN? Personally, I have come across Elements of Statistical Learning[1], Recommender Systems[2], The Algorithm Design Manual[3] in many recommended lists. 1. http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-0-387-84858-7 http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-0-387-8... 2. http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-3-319-29659-3 http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-3-319-2... 3. http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-1-84800-070-4 http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-1-84800...
- mb7733 6y agoI can second a recommendation of the Elements of Statistical Learning. It's well presented, self contained and features good exercises. It may also be slightly different in presentation from most books on ML because the authors are all professors of statistics, instead of CS. (But, it is NOT a classical statistics textbook.)
- vector_spaces 6y agoIf I'm not mistaken Elements of Statistical Learning and all other books by the authors are already available for free on their website https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/pub.htm https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/pub.htm
- dhosek 6y agoMy cousin's husband who is a math professor asked for an earlier edition of this as a Christmas gift in our family's secret Santa exchange while I was in grad school. Since I had drawn him that year, when I saw this on the list I ordered two copies since it sounded cool to me too. Parts of it are still over my head, but it's great reading.
- user982 6y agoAfter some sed and wget, the total comes to 11GB.
- yumraj 6y agoCould you share your scripts, for those or us with lesser scripting skills
- user982 6y agoPutting out a script runnable by everybody might put too much strain on Springer's servers (and their generosity). I'll give some steps that the motivated can follow instead. 1. Extract a list of all a.btn links from the OP page (382 total). 2. Issue a HEAD request and follow redirects for each link to get the actual page URL (I used curl for this). 3. The page URL contains the book ID. Compare a sample URL's format with its PDF and ePub links. Each page URL can be easily munged into both (sed here). 4. The download pages are captcha-protected, but there's a <noscript> escape hatch in the source. Find it and pass the appropriate data in a POST request to the final file URLs (wget).
- inakarmacoma 6y agoA torrent could share the load perhaps
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoSomeone released this a bit ago: https://github.com/alexgand/springer_free_books https://github.com/alexgand/springer_free_books
- inakarmacoma 6y agoPerhaps we could all seed your torrent?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
- neves 6y agoWhen I first saw the books, they presented the number of citations. It was great to infer the book quality. I don't find this info anymore.
- thundermuffin 6y agoCitations, mentions, and downloads are all on the actual Springer site and not the GitHub link it appears.
- neves 6y agoI didn't see it. Maybe it is the mobile version.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- codezero 6y agoNot sure if it's still up to date, but I appreciated the Quantum Physics text by R. Shankar when I was studying physics as a supplement to the courses I was taking for 4th/5th year physics.
- joshvm 6y agoShankar is a great textbook. Up to date in the sense that the core material hasn't changed a huge amount in the last 50 years. I didn't see it recommended in many reading list at university, but I found it... somehow? It takes a totally different approach to teaching QM by introducing vector spaces up front and sneaking in the notation for bra/kets, commutation and other goodies. Before you know if you're happy with things like <A|B> and it comes as much less of a surprise later on when used in a QM sense. The book also introduces Hamiltonian mechanics so that by the time you get to the QM postulates, you get them in a much more rigorous form than the sort of hand-waving you'd get in other introductory textbooks. I think unfortunately it does end up as a supplement as actually working through the first few chapters would take some time. However I think for getting a handle on the mathematics underneath QM, it's great. It covers a lot of stuff that's either optional or not covered on most undergraduate physics courses.
- mesaframe 6y agoThere are so many and only so much time to read. It takes a lot of time to finish any book properly. And I have already much books in my backlog.
- Zeebrommer 6y agoSame here. With so much high-quality information and entertainment available the choice of what to invest time in becomes harder and harder, eventually consuming a significant portion of that limited time budget to begin with.
- g-b-r 6y agoIn a lot cases skimming and reading some parts is already very beneficial
- Tomte 6y agoSkiena's Algorithm Design Manual and Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right stood out for me when skimming the list. Both are regularly recommended in HN book threads.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoKudos for the author for making the list more accessible! > and expects you to download some Excel sheet to figure out what they have on offer TBH, Excel isn't all that bad UX; the list is simultaneously more complete, more dense and faster to read than the web equivalent. I'd love it if there was an element in HTML for displaying modern data tables directly in the browser (with the ability to sort and pivot them).
- elric 6y agoSomewhat off topic, but I've never had much luck with digital textbooks. For some reason dead tree makes it much easier for me to actually pick up a book and start working through it. Does anyone else have this problem? :-/
- hvasilev 6y agoI used to have it, but it gets easier with time.
- BossingAround 6y agoYes. There's something about ergonomy of a digital textbook. It doesn't matter whether it's on an iPad, computer, or my Kindle. They all make it difficult. I realized though that it might be due to the fact that we do so many things on the computer. I know how many websites are just a click away. It takes a certain mindset, but typically, after 10-15 minutes, I can focus enough on the materials that even the computer is fine. It just takes practice and focus, the latter being increasingly scarce in today's world of notifications.
- maxmunzel 6y agoFor me it’s mostly the commitment I feel when physically buying something that gets me started. Most of the time I still end up reading the digital copy on my Laptop, as I personally find this more comfortable for textbooks.
- enriquto 6y ago> Does anyone else have this problem? :-/ This is not a problem! I also prefer dead trees, I just like the experience of holding and reading them. For technical books, a digital copy is useful also to find all occurrences of a word (especially on older books with incomplete indices).
- bonoboTP 6y agoIt's a problem because dead tree textbooks cost hundreds of dollars.
- Eugeleo 6y agoAny recommendations (in whatever area), apart from Elements of Statistical Learning and Linear Algebra Done Right? And are their Probability and All of Statistics books any good?
- harry8 6y agoCan vouch for, Wasserman. Is good, imho. Also lectures on YouTube and course info @ cmu.
- entha_saava 6y agoOff topic, but last time I posted a link to upenn's online books page, it went unnoticed. Great resource IMO.
- jl2718 6y agoIt amazes and upsets me to see so much knowledge in non-STEM areas, because it’s being completely ignored. Seriously, does anybody have even the slightest expectation that your CEO has studied and mastered leadership theory at the depth that is expected for introductory level of practice in mathematics? No. We accept the idea of their wisdom deriving “Straight from the gut” and that such judgement is valued at thousands of times as much as their formally-educated workers. Even in academia it seems, non-stem phds and professorships are granted on the basis of emotion-level reasoning about political belief and activism rather than candid rational inquiry.
- visarga 6y agoBeing a CEO is more about assuming risks, that's where authority comes from. As a formally educated employee you get your check every month and if you're not happy you can hop to another job easily, but a business runs the risk of wasting its money on a grand scale.
- jl2718 6y agoRisk is assumed by founders. I think that's different. Through years of working at a bunch of 'big' places, the selection of leaderships seems more and more arbitrary. The mechanical aspects of the CEO job are not dissimilar from any other job in the company, and one would expect an expert to occupy that position. I didn't intend to make that comment about pay, except that we have collectively accepted a system where an ambiguous set of emotional reactions are massively better-compensated than formal systems of knowledge and analysis.
- davidivadavid 6y agoNow if only we had a good dependency graph for these...
- ashton314 6y agoLol. I've been reading Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin Pierce. It's a fantastic book and I plan on eventually going through the whole thing. For now, I've been skipping around a bit to get to the stuff I'm interested in first. Pierce has included a lovely dependency graph between all of the chapters so you know what to read and in what order. It's super nice.
- gowld 6y agoThese are download copies, not streaming. What happens vis a via copyright after Springer stops offering these downloads?
- hnarayanan 6y agoWhat are you saying??
- g-b-r 6y agoThat we don't know if it will be legal to keep the files after they stop offering them (as it seems will happen). Of course it's unlikely that some cop will come and verify that you deleted them, but someone prefers to stay legal/honest
- vexx5702 6y agoHere's a script to automatically download the entire set: https://github.com/tempname1024/springer-dl https://github.com/tempname1024/springer-dl
- wirthjason 6y agoI added filtering the list by category/title and sent you a PR. Thanks for your work!
- tzs 6y agoEdit: I reported the issue below, and the author has fixed it. Note: that will fail on Unix/Linux to get one book, "Systems Programming in Unix/Linux" [1]. The script wants to put the book in a directory named with the book's title, and wants to include the title in the name of the PDF and/or EPUB files. The title includes a "/", which is the directory separator on Unix/Linux, so this does not work out well. You'll end up with a "Systems Programming in Unix" directory, containing a "Linux" subdirectory, and no PDF or EPUB files. As far as I can tell, it gets everything else fine. If you only want PDF files, make this change before running it: 42c42 < links = [x for x in p.links if 'content/pdf' in x or 'download/epub' in x] --- > links = [x for x in p.links if 'content/pdf' in x] A PDF only download of everything is 4.5 GB. There are 383 books. [1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-92429-8 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-92429-8
- g-b-r 6y agoI can't figure out the copyright aspect of this; yes, it's probably fine for everyone to download them while they're available, but will you be theoretically allowed to keep them after they end the promotion? I'd say yes, but maybe that's not what they meant... or maybe it's such a small revenue loss that they don't care
- ksr 6y agoThis search on Springer also yields good results https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-type=%22Book%22&showAll=false https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-type=%...