5 ms·
List of freely available programming books
- SeanDav 13y agoYet another popular, relevant and useful topic locked on StackOverflow. What a surprise....not. There seems to be a pedantic core of people on SO that go around locking topics, rather than contributing in their own area of expertise.
- pc86 13y agoThere's a decent chance that's because they have no area of expertise.
- gtz58 13y agoHaha, yeah it can be aggravating. In general though, I think it's good that there are people who care about the content so much.
- wslh 13y agoSadly neither StackOverflow nor Wikipedia have found the "PageRank of Edition".
- wging 13y agoAnd now (a) it's preserved because it has 'historical significance', yet (b) the bits are rotting as new books are released and old books' information becomes out of date
- regularfry 13y agoThe first link I clicked on in the list was dead. Admittedly I found the pdf with a trivial bit of googling, but still annoying.
- NoodleIncident 13y agoVim Recipes is a dead link. There's still a pdf and a github out there, though.
- mwfunk 13y agoSO is neither a wiki nor a forum. If the maintainers have a different vision for it, they're hardly being pedantic by not letting it turn into one of those things. The Internet isn't suffering from a shortage of wikis or forums, so maybe someone should put this page's contents in one of them?
- cruise02 13y agoWhat is a historical lock, and what is it used for? http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/126631/1288 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/126631/1288
- tux 13y agoVery nice, thank you =)
- larrydag 13y agohttp://hackershelf.com/ http://hackershelf.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- AlexanderDhoore 13y agoStructure and Interpretation of Computer Programs! [1] Read That Book. [1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
- bestieshoe6 13y agoAs someone fairly new to programming, why should I read that book?
- anaphor 13y agoBecause the theme music is awesome
- pandeiro 13y agoTo say nothing of the hairstyles
- 6d0debc071 13y agoIt contains a lot of, fairly well developed, underlying theory on how to write good programs. The maths in the first couple of chapters may be a little off putting - there's an old idea that people write books that concern the problems they're interested in even when trying to teach you something else - but you don't really have to understand the mathy bits to benefit from the book. If you've only done imperative programming before then it should be pretty eye-opening. If you've done functional programming before then it's not quite as O_O inducing, but still worth a read. Also, it's effectively free so you can easily have a look yourself ^_^
- jgg 13y agoPlenty of people who are good programmers don't read the book and are fine. Lots of people cargo-cult it and themselves don't understand it, which turns people off. However, it focuses very much on the principles of programming from a high-level, and has challenging exercises that keep you engaged. It's a programming book written from a Computer Science perspective. It uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, which frustrates some. However, I think Scheme works best for the book, and replacing Scheme with something "useful" like Python would be the equivalent of taking a linguistics course that uses Latin as a generic vehicle to explain various grammatical constructs, and suddenly replacing Latin with Latin American Spanish - sure, Latin isn't "practical", but that's not the point. I did not read it knowing "nothing", as some people suggest you should. I already knew how to get around in C++ and Python, and then read it on my own. You don't really get Concrete Skill X from reading the book (and working through the exercises). It's a high-level work. What I got from it was a high-level perspective on languages, algorithms and abstraction techniques. I learned to see imperative, OO, functional and other programming paradigms as tools in a toolbox that have advantages and disadvantages, not as the One True Way to program. I also learned to, in general, think about the literal and not-so-literal implications of my code. The latter half of the book is more about language implementation, and culminates in implementing Scheme, among other things. MIT phased out the book in its introductory course because, "Understanding the principles is not essential for an introduction to the subject matter anymore." Take from that what you will.
- mylorse 13y agoThere's like so many, esp. libraries: http://libgen.info/ http://libgen.info/ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing
- chollida1 13y agoLooks like someone is after their stackoverflow promoter badge;) On a serious note, this is actually a good resource, and probably an example of a question that wouldn't be allowed on Stackoverflow today but is kept around due to it being so darn popular.
- marijn 13y agoThis has been driving in the ~1000 hits per month range to http://eloquentjavascript.net http://eloquentjavascript.net for ages. Since that's just one link in the huge list, I guess lots of people are landing on it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zek 13y agoThe problem I have with this is that there are so many options , someone looking at this has no real reference as to which books are better, how easy they are to read, etc. Its just a giant list!
- milesokeefe 13y agoYeah you might as well google "free programming books"
- arikrak 13y agoI created a table of interactive programming resources that just recommends 1 (or 2) options for each category: http://www.learneroo.com/courses/12/nodes/96 http://www.learneroo.com/courses/12/nodes/96
- Kenan 13y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3232026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3232026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737324
- dante9999 13y agoSo what do you think I should read from this list? (I have a day off tomorrow and so far haven't planned anything meaningful)
- mindcrime 13y agoFor other free books of potential interest to hackers, see: http://csbooks.reddit.com http://csbooks.reddit.com http://econbooks.reddit.com http://econbooks.reddit.com http://physicsbooks.reddit.com http://physicsbooks.reddit.com http://mathbooks.reddit.com http://mathbooks.reddit.com http://eebooks.reddit.com http://eebooks.reddit.com