[HN Gopher] Free Programing Books
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Free Programing Books
Author : fmfamaral
Score : 146 points
Date : 2025-10-18 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| piskov wrote:
| Tsundoku (Ji nDu ) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading
| materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading
| them. The term is also used to refer to unread books on a
| bookshelf meant for reading later.
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| Nice!
|
| Taleb calls it the anti-library
| yulker wrote:
| Spiritually different intention, but both yield lots of
| unread material at hand. The parent's is "bought with best
| intentions" but letting it pile up despite that intention,
| Taleb's is purposefully accumulating material that you don't
| intend to read unless a future you finds it helpful to
| explore that book
| treetalker wrote:
| Research tool!
| f1shy wrote:
| This is what I do. When I see a free PDF that seems well
| written, or was suggested to me, I save it in the bucket
| "maybe someday I might need that" but l know I will 99%
| never read. My experience is that it is useful. At least 10
| books that were deep in that bucket were useful for me, and
| ended reading them. I must have 10000 though.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The time is not far where you'll be able to train an LLM
| on them, which will then present to you the information
| as you need it.
| dunham wrote:
| do pdfs count? % mdfind -onlyin ~ kind:pdf
| |wc -l 11116
|
| (2k of those are in my directory of github checkouts and there
| are duplicates in there.)
| mindcrime wrote:
| They totally do! And epub, mobi, djvu...
| prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.pdf" |
| wc -l 18952
| prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.epub" |
| wc -l 2385
| prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.djvu" |
| wc -l 1384
| prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.mobi" |
| wc -l 125
|
| (There are definitely duplicates in those, FWIW)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Why are you downloading mobi files? Seriously, I only do
| that if there is no epub, and only keep it long enough to
| convert it.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Pretty much that. If the only copy I can find is .mobi..
| or, occasionally perhaps, just by mistake.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Is mdfind a Windows executable? Is there a standalone version
| that I might be able to use on the rare occasions I need to
| fight with somebody's Windows box?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| mdfind is a built-in with macOS. It's similar to find
| (should be on your *nix system if you have one) which can
| be installed with Cygwin on Windows. On Windows, you'd use
| Powershell and Get-ChildItem (I don't think it's case
| sensitive, but I don't use PS much).
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thank you
| dunham wrote:
| mdfind is the command line interface to macos "Spotlight",
| which is the global file index. So it can do things like
| full text search in addition to matching metadata values or
| size bigger than X.
|
| I don't know windows well enough to know the equivalent.
| But I think there is an index on windows, and powershell
| may be able to poke at it.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thank you
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| Why do you make PDFs of github checkouts?
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled
| exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in, like
| your bookshelf or ebook directory. The only caveat when it
| comes to paper is not to buy shit e.g. bestsellers, or software
| books that you're not going to read and use right away. If you
| don't buy shit (this is also true with board games and
| guitars), you can resell likely for about what you paid (or
| sometimes unexpectedly far more), whenever you want.
|
| Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and
| everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because
| they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If
| you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will
| pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially
| for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated
| before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages
| for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled
| exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in
|
| That sounds like quite the endorsement for targeted
| advertising. In a good way - really I would love targeted
| advertising if it were implemented differently.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Pretty well-established that targeted advertising works
| better than untargeted advertising, all other things being
| equal.
|
| I think you should put things in your bookshelf or
| collection of pdfs to hold off FOMO. When you finally get
| back around to being interested in Bosnian history, the
| books you wanted might be impossible to get. If you never
| get back around to it, you can help some stranger out who
| did.
|
| I guess this is becoming less true with the libgens and
| annas-archives of the world, but when those all disappear
| on the same day (that seemed like any other), you'll have
| missed out. I certainly don't miss the days when I spent
| years waiting for a book to come up on ebay or
| used.addall.com at a price under $150.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Targeted ads are great, when it's actually consumer
| focused. Sadly the nature of modern ads makes it so all the
| power is taken from the consumer. A proper targeted ad
| should have the ability to say to it "I never want to see
| yo again", and virtually no advert would ever want that to
| happen.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and
| everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers
| because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or
| shrewd.
|
| In the context of technical/political pieces, perhaps. But I
| have some reservations with even that limited scope
|
| 1. It's fine to target a more general audience if it gets
| them interested in a subject to begin with. Some inaccuracies
| help give context to learning before you break them. e.g.
| Saying "you can't subtract 3 from 2" in early learning,
| before later learning about the negative number space.
|
| 2. How many books of this nature even make best seller? Most
| stuff tends to be fiction or biographical so there's not much
| "wrong" there. Political stuff will be there as well, but is
| ultimately subjective.
| geoffbp wrote:
| Programming*
| fmfamaral wrote:
| :\
| Jtsummers wrote:
| If you can't edit it anymore, email the mods. Their contact
| is at the bottom of the page.
| globular-toast wrote:
| So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I
| truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If
| you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you.
| Try getting hard copies of some books you think you should read.
| Personally I can never read text books on screens, but I devour
| them in paper format.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Books are among the smallest (complete) media I own. Even a
| single album weighs in heavier than all but my largest books,
| and even with the largest those only just barely exceed the
| smallest of albums. They're easy to store, I won't later want a
| "higher resolution" book. Easy to organize (and it will only
| become easier... I expect technology/software that will allow
| better indexing in the near future). The books I keep now can
| become my family's library, shared and copied as my family
| becomes larger and more distant in the future. Immune from DRM
| or copyright regulations, invisible to anti-piracy efforts, and
| ever growing.
|
| They don't even print the books I'd want on the kinds of paper
| that would last more than 20 years, and I can't afford the sort
| of museum-level-preservation effort it would require to take
| advantage of that supposing they did.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read
| them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can
| do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working
| for you.
|
| I think if you can convert them into audio, then they'd have a
| better chance of getting consumed while doing an activity like
| cooking, working out, or walking. I find it hard now to find
| dedicated time for just reading a book.
| Qem wrote:
| The Pharo site has a section with several free books on the
| language: https://books.pharo.org/
| mystraline wrote:
| If you head to libgen.ac, you can find nearly every book.
|
| Sure, its a 'pirate library'. But seriously, if public libraries
| were created in the last 20 years, they would be banned as well.
|
| And that's also not saying anything about the AI companies, both
| targeting everything they can get their mitts on.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| A few more that young developers need to read:
|
| Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before
| Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to
| coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous
| article by Vannevar Bush
|
| https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr...
|
| Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as
| pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces
| look like when you can use human intuition to work through them."
|
| https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...
|
| Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This
| treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely
| ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work
| will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of
| computing."
|
| https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask
|
| Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the
| mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation
| paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some
| sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics."
|
| https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...
|
| Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet
| some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine
| what, "social histories for extending research" would look like
| if taken seriously.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
|
| Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not
| as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied
| Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational
| classic.
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe...
|
| Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of
| insights into the history of programming languages and computing
| paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful.
|
| https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11
|
| Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We
| started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations
| of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to
| (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to
| linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now
| live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed
| realization of portable computers in the form of brainwashing-
| outrage machines smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How
| can we significantly improve computers for human beings?
| InMice wrote:
| Good list. Would be nice to add more metadata like publication
| year
| OutOfHere wrote:
| It's not a good list because each book's year is not noted. Also,
| ideally the books would be reverse sorted by year. Older books
| become obsolete quickly.
| vram22 wrote:
| Code Complete by Steve McConnell is a very good one.
|
| Edn. 1 is better than Edn. 2.
|
| All, IMO.
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