10 ms·

It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free. If you're reading a math textbook, or a CS textbook, or any but the most fluffy programmin

by anatoly 11y ago

It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free. If you're reading a math textbook, or a CS textbook, or any but the most fluffy programming book, then you're giving it so much of your time and attention that any cost up to $100 is meaningless next to how much one book is better or worse than another. I see people living in the First World and saying things like "I wanted to learn calculus from this very well-recommended book, but it costs $50, so I got this reprint of an older textbook for $15". You're basing your choice of the guide to challenging material that you predict will be tough to understand on the cost of a dinner and a movie. Textbooks are not commodities! Some of them are really good and others are really bad and it depends on the student, too. It isn't always that the more expensive one is better, to be sure. Often it's just the opposite. I'm saying you should just forget about price altogether and choose based on sampling/reviews/recommendations. Things may be difficult for someone truly in dire poverty, or someone living in a poor country where $50 is more like the month's earnings. Those people should just go to gen.lib.rus.ec and download everything.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Ok using a Calculus book as an example was not helpful. They are indeed a commodity. There are dozens of new ones printed every year; they contain the same centuries-old truths in different words. E.g. if you found a really good one, would you throw it away and buy a 'new' one every year? Of course not.
codingdave 11y ago
You could use those exact same points to argue the opposite conclusion - every book is different, as is every student. Why not try the free ones first to see if you are able to learn from them, before shelling out 100 bucks? If the free one fails you, then go ahead and buy another.
- melling 11y ago
  Because time is your most precious commodity.
  - joshuacc 11y ago
    Economically speaking, that isn't true of everyone, particularly those with low incomes and few immediate work opportunities. Sometimes people are money-poor and time-rich, so it makes sense for them to spend time rather than money on these books. (Presumably with the hope that the skills they acquire can then be used to move into a money-rich industry.)
    - pmelendez 11y ago
      That's true but then in that case you don't have an option. I think OP's point is when you do have the option of buying a $100 but you think it twice because the high cost. If you can't afford a $100 textbook then you have to go to alternatives (renting, public library, free alternatives, etc.)
megaman22 11y ago
On the other hand, for fundamental subjects like math or CS algorithms/foundations, the difference between the newer and older editions of a text are not always very significant. University textbooks can be pretty egregious in this regard - some authors (who tend to be professors that use their own book for their courses...) just add a new foreword and maybe a new chapter, or slightly rework the homework exercises and release a new edition. So students need to buy the new $100+ edition, instead of getting a used copy at 50% of the price. For more cutting-edge technologies, it does make sense to buy the latest and greatest. Although if it is something that is rapidly evolving, you may still be better off relying on the current documentation on the web - the lag time involved in writing a book can make it difficult to keep up-to-date as things change.
SpendBig 11y ago
It's not just reading stuff, you should be passionate about the knowledge you would like to acquire. Most of the time people just read and read thinking they will be an expert after just reading a book.
okal 11y ago
It's a little presumptuous to assume that everyone who could possibly need access to a technical book has a loose $15 to spare. I know I didn't when I built it, as a 2nd year undergrad not living in a First World economy. The authors who chose to make them free obviously had a wider audience in mind than people who can afford their books. I can, and do, buy books now that I can afford them, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better introduction to Python than Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, a free book.
mmf 11y ago
It's so easy to forget that your salary is not everybody's salary. In Italy (a first world country afaik) a post doc makes a grand total of about 30 euros per day. An assistant professor probably around 45, which is similar to the entry salary of a software engineer. If you subtract food, housing and transportation, that $100 book starts looking very (very) expensive. For a large fraction of the world's population time is not money...
- ranit 11y ago
  Could you please provide some links for Italian salaries, if possible. You made me curious.
  - shaneofalltrad 11y ago
    Let's not forget a free online book if posted on Hacker News is impossibly slow to access! I am getting 502's. I am fairly new (3-4) years as a developer and I have gone the free route, still do. But Some of my best books came from early releases @ Oreily using the 50% off sales they almost always have floating around. Typically the free books are older and dated in my experience, but not always. Depends if you have the time to learn and possibly unlearn some things.
    - ranit 11y ago
      Perhaps your response was meant for some other comment. I asked mmf for links that show Italian salaries, I didn't ask for free book links :-)
  - tangue 11y ago
    I was curious too : according to this NYT Op ed [1] " The average salary for an Italian born in the 1980s is about €1,000 a month, or about $1,375" Wolfram tells another story but I suspect the average and median wage are not useful in such a sample. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/opinion/severgnini-italians-on-the-run.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/opinion/severgnini-italian... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=salary+italy https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=salary+italy
austenallred 11y ago
One of the most life-changing experiences I've ever had came when I decided to not limit myself from buying books/educational materials. See something on you want to learn, the book is $50 on Amazon? I gave myself permission to just buy it and not really feel bad about it. That can seem expensive - there were times when I would spend $200/month on books and $500 on everything else (food, rent, etc). In the short run it really hurt. In the long run, however, it made a huge difference. I estimate that my current salary is 3x what it would be had I not done that. I honestly believe I would have been pigeon-holed and trapped in a dead-end industry with little hope for a better future. Being willing to buy the best books certainly makes sense when you consider how much I was paying for a private college tuition. I ended up dropping out (long story), but if $50 was really going to help me learn enough to be a little more successful, it's totally worth it. Can you get all of the same information for free? Most likely; the problem is that you end up spending half of your time searching for it. I found that being unwilling to buy books was completely damning to my progress. (That being said, some of the best education I ever received were things I got for free online - Stanford's CS106A is where I finally started to "get" programming.) The point is, make sure that spending your own education is at the top of your priority list. That could mean any number of things. I don't want to justify someone going 300k into debt to get a worthless degree, but if there's something you're really passionate about don't let a few bucks hold you back.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  This is a good suggestion and also mirrors my own experience with buying books. Once I got myself past the sticker shock (why are all of the books about things I am interested in somehow expensive fucking textbooks?!), it really started giving me an incredibly high return on investment. That being said, I think it's criminally malicious to lock knowledge away behind a paywall. Free is a good start.
  - nkassis 11y ago
    I can echo both of your experiences. I'm mostly self taught as a software engineer. I switch to mathematics as a major after my first year in Computer Science. I did take intro to programming classes and other computer science related math courses but never got pass that stuff. Without books I would have huge gaps in my knowledge. But I'm a technical book addict. I've often ended up in some trouble at the end of the month due to buying to many $50+ books. But my career depended on it. I like the fact that books give a good overview of subjects. Even if you don't remember the little details, at least knowing something exists helps when you look for a solution to a problem. That's the biggest drawback I see whit just trying to learn online from blogs and free books. But I will say there are a few really good book on that lists. Some that I've paid a lot to get.
candu 11y ago
The cost of any given book might be "meaningless". It adds up. Imagine spending that $50 a few dozen times, and you've got the beginnings of a decent technical bookshelf - but now we're talking about thousands of dollars, which is a financial obstacle to most people.
dionidium 11y ago
If $100 seems like a meaningless amount of money to you, then nothing I say here will make you understand what it feels like when that's practically an infinite amount of money. I've been on both sides of this and it's pretty hard to understand one side from the point of view of the other. I hope you'll just take my word for it that $100 is not a meaningless amount of money to most people.
- Liquix 11y ago
  Yeah... As a college student with student loans, rent, utilities, and $30 a week for food, there's not much more room in my budget for books. If I read a medicore free textbook and learn something, that's more than I learned from the $50 textbook that I couldn't buy.
  - nazgob 11y ago
    Does your university has library?
  - anatoly 11y ago
    Do you own a smartphone?
    - johnmaguire 11y ago
      A $350 or less smartphone provides more value than three or four $100 textbooks any day.
      - nazgob 11y ago
        Depends what do you use smartfone for. Most people use it for facebook and mindless browsing. You can do that less comfortably on cheaper phone.
        johnmaguire 11y ago
        What? Look at the price of Nexus devices for example. Those things are well powered enough to do anything your flagship can.
orbifold 11y ago
Luckily there is a collection of a large number of textbooks (Library Genesis, approx. 1 million) available online, curated in russia originally on dvd's that can be found by anyone determined enough to look. They have books that I needed to wait 2-3 weeks to get at the university library, because they were in storage.
- douche 11y ago
  Damn, that will be fantastic for rare and out of print stuff. If I had known when I was in school... Although citing books that aren't in the university library might be problematic.
S4M 11y ago
I think a book being free is a good reason to start learning about something. Let's say someone wants to read something about cryptography knowing nothing about it. Paying $100 for a book that he doesn't know if he'll read it thoroughly or if it will be interesting seems a bit of a waste; better take a free book to get a taste of the new field, before buying another one - or donating to the author of the free book. Having said that, I noticed that the fact of paying for a book makes me more motivated to read it, while I often read couple of pages of the free books before giving up.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
even if the books cost one cent, I would still prefer them free.
mathattack 11y ago
It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free. Yes, time is the biggest cost of any book. But there are some massively helpful [0], current [1] and legendary [2] books on this list. [0] Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw [1] Street-Fighting Mathematics by Sanjoy Mahajan [2] Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman
dragonwriter 11y ago
> It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free. For deep study, and assuming you can effectively evaluate other relevant qualities of books before committing to one, sure. OTOH, the first isn't the only thing technical books are useful for, and the second isn't always true of non-free books. > I'm saying you should just forget about price altogether and choose based on sampling/reviews/recommendations. Other than personally-trusted sources that are familiar with the area in question, I find reviews/recommendations to be extremely unreliable, and the decline in brick-and-mortar distribution channels, and the frequently poor sampling options for non-free books (digital or hardcopy) in online retailers make that also poor. Free electronic books thus have a significant advantage in the ability to effectively evaluate quality before making a substantial commitment of money or time.
smegel 11y ago
> I wanted to learn calculus from this very well-recommended book, but it costs $50, so I got this reprint of an older textbook for $15 To be fair, the textbook industry is like a mafia scam, releasing new books in complicity with University courses that then "require" the new edition. In many cases, the $15 second hand book is just fine.
e12e 11y ago
After reading parts of a free book (or several), one might be much better qualified for buying one 100 dollar book. It's not like expensive books are good and free/cheap ones are bad - as a general rule.

by anatoly 11y ago

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Ok using a Calculus book as an example was not helpful. They are indeed a commodity. There are dozens of new ones printed every year; they contain the same centuries-old truths in different words. E.g. if you found a really good one, would you throw it away and buy a 'new' one every year? Of course not.

codingdave 11y ago

You could use those exact same points to argue the opposite conclusion - every book is different, as is every student. Why not try the free ones first to see if you are able to learn from them, before shelling out 100 bucks? If the free one fails you, then go ahead and buy another.

melling 11y ago
Because time is your most precious commodity.
- joshuacc 11y ago
  Economically speaking, that isn't true of everyone, particularly those with low incomes and few immediate work opportunities. Sometimes people are money-poor and time-rich, so it makes sense for them to spend time rather than money on these books. (Presumably with the hope that the skills they acquire can then be used to move into a money-rich industry.)
  - pmelendez 11y ago
    That's true but then in that case you don't have an option. I think OP's point is when you do have the option of buying a $100 but you think it twice because the high cost. If you can't afford a $100 textbook then you have to go to alternatives (renting, public library, free alternatives, etc.)

megaman22 11y ago

On the other hand, for fundamental subjects like math or CS algorithms/foundations, the difference between the newer and older editions of a text are not always very significant. University textbooks can be pretty egregious in this regard - some authors (who tend to be professors that use their own book for their courses...) just add a new foreword and maybe a new chapter, or slightly rework the homework exercises and release a new edition. So students need to buy the new $100+ edition, instead of getting a used copy at 50% of the price. For more cutting-edge technologies, it does make sense to buy the latest and greatest. Although if it is something that is rapidly evolving, you may still be better off relying on the current documentation on the web - the lag time involved in writing a book can make it difficult to keep up-to-date as things change.

SpendBig 11y ago

It's not just reading stuff, you should be passionate about the knowledge you would like to acquire. Most of the time people just read and read thinking they will be an expert after just reading a book.

okal 11y ago

It's a little presumptuous to assume that everyone who could possibly need access to a technical book has a loose $15 to spare. I know I didn't when I built it, as a 2nd year undergrad not living in a First World economy. The authors who chose to make them free obviously had a wider audience in mind than people who can afford their books. I can, and do, buy books now that I can afford them, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better introduction to Python than Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, a free book.

mmf 11y ago

It's so easy to forget that your salary is not everybody's salary. In Italy (a first world country afaik) a post doc makes a grand total of about 30 euros per day. An assistant professor probably around 45, which is similar to the entry salary of a software engineer. If you subtract food, housing and transportation, that $100 book starts looking very (very) expensive. For a large fraction of the world's population time is not money...

ranit 11y ago
Could you please provide some links for Italian salaries, if possible. You made me curious.
- shaneofalltrad 11y ago
  Let's not forget a free online book if posted on Hacker News is impossibly slow to access! I am getting 502's. I am fairly new (3-4) years as a developer and I have gone the free route, still do. But Some of my best books came from early releases @ Oreily using the 50% off sales they almost always have floating around. Typically the free books are older and dated in my experience, but not always. Depends if you have the time to learn and possibly unlearn some things.
  - ranit 11y ago
    Perhaps your response was meant for some other comment. I asked mmf for links that show Italian salaries, I didn't ask for free book links :-)
- tangue 11y ago
  I was curious too : according to this NYT Op ed [1] " The average salary for an Italian born in the 1980s is about €1,000 a month, or about $1,375" Wolfram tells another story but I suspect the average and median wage are not useful in such a sample. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/opinion/severgnini-italians-on-the-run.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/opinion/severgnini-italian... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=salary+italy https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=salary+italy

austenallred 11y ago

One of the most life-changing experiences I've ever had came when I decided to not limit myself from buying books/educational materials. See something on you want to learn, the book is $50 on Amazon? I gave myself permission to just buy it and not really feel bad about it. That can seem expensive - there were times when I would spend $200/month on books and $500 on everything else (food, rent, etc). In the short run it really hurt. In the long run, however, it made a huge difference. I estimate that my current salary is 3x what it would be had I not done that. I honestly believe I would have been pigeon-holed and trapped in a dead-end industry with little hope for a better future. Being willing to buy the best books certainly makes sense when you consider how much I was paying for a private college tuition. I ended up dropping out (long story), but if $50 was really going to help me learn enough to be a little more successful, it's totally worth it. Can you get all of the same information for free? Most likely; the problem is that you end up spending half of your time searching for it. I found that being unwilling to buy books was completely damning to my progress. (That being said, some of the best education I ever received were things I got for free online - Stanford's CS106A is where I finally started to "get" programming.) The point is, make sure that spending your own education is at the top of your priority list. That could mean any number of things. I don't want to justify someone going 300k into debt to get a worthless degree, but if there's something you're really passionate about don't let a few bucks hold you back.

fapjacks 11y ago
This is a good suggestion and also mirrors my own experience with buying books. Once I got myself past the sticker shock (why are all of the books about things I am interested in somehow expensive fucking textbooks?!), it really started giving me an incredibly high return on investment. That being said, I think it's criminally malicious to lock knowledge away behind a paywall. Free is a good start.
- nkassis 11y ago
  I can echo both of your experiences. I'm mostly self taught as a software engineer. I switch to mathematics as a major after my first year in Computer Science. I did take intro to programming classes and other computer science related math courses but never got pass that stuff. Without books I would have huge gaps in my knowledge. But I'm a technical book addict. I've often ended up in some trouble at the end of the month due to buying to many $50+ books. But my career depended on it. I like the fact that books give a good overview of subjects. Even if you don't remember the little details, at least knowing something exists helps when you look for a solution to a problem. That's the biggest drawback I see whit just trying to learn online from blogs and free books. But I will say there are a few really good book on that lists. Some that I've paid a lot to get.

candu 11y ago

The cost of any given book might be "meaningless". It adds up. Imagine spending that $50 a few dozen times, and you've got the beginnings of a decent technical bookshelf - but now we're talking about thousands of dollars, which is a financial obstacle to most people.

dionidium 11y ago

If $100 seems like a meaningless amount of money to you, then nothing I say here will make you understand what it feels like when that's practically an infinite amount of money. I've been on both sides of this and it's pretty hard to understand one side from the point of view of the other. I hope you'll just take my word for it that $100 is not a meaningless amount of money to most people.

Liquix 11y ago
Yeah... As a college student with student loans, rent, utilities, and $30 a week for food, there's not much more room in my budget for books. If I read a medicore free textbook and learn something, that's more than I learned from the $50 textbook that I couldn't buy.
- nazgob 11y ago
  Does your university has library?
- anatoly 11y ago
  Do you own a smartphone?
  - johnmaguire 11y ago
    A $350 or less smartphone provides more value than three or four $100 textbooks any day.
    - nazgob 11y ago
      Depends what do you use smartfone for. Most people use it for facebook and mindless browsing. You can do that less comfortably on cheaper phone.
      - johnmaguire 11y ago
        What? Look at the price of Nexus devices for example. Those things are well powered enough to do anything your flagship can.

orbifold 11y ago

Luckily there is a collection of a large number of textbooks (Library Genesis, approx. 1 million) available online, curated in russia originally on dvd's that can be found by anyone determined enough to look. They have books that I needed to wait 2-3 weeks to get at the university library, because they were in storage.

douche 11y ago
Damn, that will be fantastic for rare and out of print stuff. If I had known when I was in school... Although citing books that aren't in the university library might be problematic.

S4M 11y ago

I think a book being free is a good reason to start learning about something. Let's say someone wants to read something about cryptography knowing nothing about it. Paying $100 for a book that he doesn't know if he'll read it thoroughly or if it will be interesting seems a bit of a waste; better take a free book to get a taste of the new field, before buying another one - or donating to the author of the free book. Having said that, I noticed that the fact of paying for a book makes me more motivated to read it, while I often read couple of pages of the free books before giving up.

crimsonalucard 11y ago

even if the books cost one cent, I would still prefer them free.

mathattack 11y ago

It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free. Yes, time is the biggest cost of any book. But there are some massively helpful [0], current [1] and legendary [2] books on this list. [0] Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw [1] Street-Fighting Mathematics by Sanjoy Mahajan [2] Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

dragonwriter 11y ago

> It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free. For deep study, and assuming you can effectively evaluate other relevant qualities of books before committing to one, sure. OTOH, the first isn't the only thing technical books are useful for, and the second isn't always true of non-free books. > I'm saying you should just forget about price altogether and choose based on sampling/reviews/recommendations. Other than personally-trusted sources that are familiar with the area in question, I find reviews/recommendations to be extremely unreliable, and the decline in brick-and-mortar distribution channels, and the frequently poor sampling options for non-free books (digital or hardcopy) in online retailers make that also poor. Free electronic books thus have a significant advantage in the ability to effectively evaluate quality before making a substantial commitment of money or time.

smegel 11y ago

> I wanted to learn calculus from this very well-recommended book, but it costs $50, so I got this reprint of an older textbook for $15 To be fair, the textbook industry is like a mafia scam, releasing new books in complicity with University courses that then "require" the new edition. In many cases, the $15 second hand book is just fine.

e12e 11y ago

After reading parts of a free book (or several), one might be much better qualified for buying one 100 dollar book. It's not like expensive books are good and free/cheap ones are bad - as a general rule.