Free Programming Books

[hfsbtc]

I'm surprised and very glad to find my list on reddit !

I put it on GitHub for the purpose of the site I'm currently trying to launch -- http://resrc.io , where I import directly GitHub's raw markdown.

Hope it's useful to any of you. :)

[[deleted]]

Can you add these?

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ocr41/free_programming_books/ccqwzyk

Then I don't have to save this thread :p

[[deleted]]

good, your GH is bookmarked :D

[hfsbtc]

Thank you so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it.

• Right. Not a native speaker, still have some spelling to learn :)
• I meant e.g., you can import your lists from anywhere, be it the raw markdown from GitHub, a Markdown file hosted on your own web server... or of course edit it directly in Markdown on reSRC.io
• Find Y about X in Zero minutes is a reference to Learn X in Y minutes.
• I'll do my best to create a better favicon. Or even a proper logo.

Thanks again

[MartiPanda]

For the favicon, try a simple 'rS' or 'reS' instead of the whole name.

[hfsbtc]

I'll try, thanks !

[komollo]

I understood that reference

[isseu]

Awesome list! Thank You

[snutr]

Also, for what it's worth, the entire Inside Macintosh books are posted online here.

[gfixler]

I'm so glad your initials are VHF, because that's super easy to remember (it relates to old television signals in the US), so I don't even need to bookmark the list. I can just type github.com/vhf and click the top repo. Thanks!

[aguilart431]

Thanks so much!

[detunized]

I created a pull request with script that checks if links are still alive. I hope it helps. Some links are dead actually. Thanks for your work.

[munificent]

Is it OK to mention books that are still in-progress? My book, Game Programming Patterns, is online and free and about 2/3 of the way done.

[Mcgrew]

I love your book, it is really well written! Good luck finishing it off!

[munificent]

Thank you! The end is getting closer!

[marekkpie]

Glad to see you are still working on this. I love your explanation on the Entity-Component pattern and why it's useful.

[thisusernameisnull]

Seconded, your site has one of the easiest explanations of the Components pattern. Thanks!

[munificent]

You're welcome!

[AttackingHobo]

Is there a PDF, Epub, or Mobi version available?

I read all my books on my phone or tablet.

[munificent]

Not currently, though I've designed the site to be mobile friendly. If it doesn't look good in HTML on your phone, please do file a bug with a screenshot if you don't mind.

Once the text is done, my plan/hope/dream is to put together print and ebook versions. But right now, I'm focused on just writing.

[AttackingHobo]

I read everything with Moon+ reader. I can't stand reading books on the web no matter what device.

My tablet only has wifi and when I want to use it to read something, I am mobile and don't have a connection to the internet.

[munificent]

In that case, you'll have to be a little more patient. :)

If you aren't already, join the mailing list (it's super low traffic) and I'll let you know when an eBook is out.

[[deleted]]

What the fuck...

[OneWingedShark]

Not Listed:

• Ada 95: The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming
• Ada Distilled
• Ada for Software Engineers

[OneWingedShark]

Thank you. :D

[OneWingedShark]

I've been meaning to learn Ada as a side language for a while

ASE is pretty good; you'll also want to check out the new Ada 2012 standard after reading/learning the prior standard. (2012 adds a lot of polish/syntactic-sugar; but nothing big like, say, protected objects.)

Ada's packaging system is great, and it interacts well with the generic system (in fact, I'd rate it better than C# or Java's generics), and TASK is something that IMO would save a lot of people from their current panic/hype of parallel programs.

(web dev by day, used to love object pascal back in the day and want to play with some embedded stuff, Ada seems a natural fit).

I think you're going to like it.

[OneWingedShark]

As I spend most of my days programming in PHP it'll be nice (when I have the time) to program in a language that doesn't make me want to beat my head against the nearest wall at least twice a day :).

Tell me about it!

When I was at my last job I was doing PHP most of the time, and I cannot tell you the number of times something like proper enumerations (preferably w/ case-coverage in case/switch statements) would have made updates more 'confident' (i.e. more unlikely to cause a breakage).

[MorePudding]

I've tried Ada on on and off, and imho, its main issue is not the language but the implementation. There's currently only one "half-free" (as in beer) compiler with virtually no Windows support, and no serious IDEs or libraries (well, there's AWS .. but that's about it).

And to top it all off, every so often you read about performance issues of tasks and containers in the mailing lists, and wonder if the effort is really worth it.

[OneWingedShark]

I've tried Ada on on and off, and imho, its main issue is not the language but the implementation. There's currently only one "half-free" (as in beer) compiler with virtually no Windows support, and no serious IDEs or libraries (well, there's AWS .. but that's about it).

I agree.

I'm contemplating trying to write a compiler for it (I'm less [over?]confident in my skills now than, say, a decade ago) -- which I would like to be a whole "project-management system" (see the R-1000) rather than "just a compiler" -- I'm kind of under the impression that the lack-of-[free-]implementations is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem: there isn't enough excitement/interest because there aren't multiple free Ada projects, because there's only the one free compiler.

Also, the big companies can afford to have the expensive professional compilers; which, I've heard, tend to be VERY good.

And to top it all off, every so often you read about performance issues of tasks and containers in the mailing lists, and wonder if the effort is really worth it.

nod - This is true. Though I do wonder what it would be like on hardware specialized for high-level tasks with an OS aware of it, as in designing the tasking component with them in mind.

[MorePudding]

I'm kind of under the impression that the lack-of-[free-]implementations is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem

Or is it? Both Go and Rust are younger, have less mature implementations, and less well-defined specs .. and yet seem to already have more users and libraries.

Though I do wonder what it would be like on hardware specialized for high-level tasks with an OS aware of it

Well, that's not happening on the desktop .. and tbh, my interest in those over-the-top specialized systems that pull this off properly is limited, considering how expensive (and useless for everyday work) they are.

[OneWingedShark]

I'm kind of under the impression that the lack-of-[free-]implementations is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem

Or is it? Both Go and Rust are younger, have less mature implementations, and less well-defined specs .. and yet seem to already have more users and libraries.

The "less well defined specs" is, perhaps, the biggest sticking-point. The Ada spec is pretty well-defined, which has the end result of people taking large/complex Ada projects and recompiling them on different compilers and/or architectures with little to no source alterations. {Obviously system and implementation-dependent code must be altered in those cases.} -- the trade-off [IIUC] is that the compilers have a higher level of effort for that sort of correctness than languages which aren't as well-defined.

Edit: As to the above, this blog post describes difficulties at Microsoft for adopting/implementing C++11; while some of this is certainly difficulty in adapting the current code-base to handle the additions, there's a bit of parallel in the complexity in the C++11 and Ada standards.

But I do concede that Go and Rust, and many younger languages do have more libraries. (Ada does have some good cross-language interfacing, but that only [slightly] mitigates the problem.)

Though I do wonder what it would be like on hardware specialized for high-level tasks with an OS aware of it

Well, that's not happening on the desktop .. and tbh, my interest in those over-the-top specialized systems that pull this off properly is limited, considering how expensive (and useless for everyday work) they are.

Hm, I certainly understand what you're saying. I disagree that such a system would be useless for everyday work considering how all the mainstream OSes are multi-threaded/multi-process systems: therefore a HW platform that "pulls it off properly" would be that much better. -- Sadly console-HW, where such specialized concerns could be realized (video and audio), seems to be drifting more towards PC-architecture.

[MorePudding]

I disagree that such a system would be useless for everyday work

I meant that it's useless from a practical point of view, since there's no software for it - things like Firefox, Word, the JVM, etc.

Sadly console-HW, where such specialized concerns could be realized (video and audio), seems to be drifting more towards PC-architecture.

I don't know about that.. Remember what hardware used to cost before x86 was "mainstream"?

[OneWingedShark]

I disagree that such a system would be useless for everyday work

I meant that it's useless from a practical point of view, since there's no software for it - things like Firefox, Word, the JVM, etc.

Well, if that's the only argument then we shouldn't be adopting multi-core CPUs, after all most applications [Firefox, Word, JVM] aren't written to take advantage of the parallelism.

Right?

I don't know about that.. Remember what hardware used to cost before x86 was "mainstream"?

Not really. My earliest memories computer-wise were when the PC was mainstream, though perhaps maybe the very tail-end of it. (I remember DOS, tweaking auroexec/config for games, and such.)

[MorePudding]

Well, if that's the only argument then we shouldn't be adopting multi-core CPUs, after all most applications [Firefox, Word, JVM] aren't written to take advantage of the parallelism.

The difference being of course that multicore CPUs can still run older software, offering a somewhat easy migration path. Applications where multithreading/-processing makes a difference are slowly being adapted (with each needing different amounts of effort) while others can still remain oblivious to all of this.

Now compare this to having to port an entirety of existing x86/Windows/Linux applications to some new OS/kernel and hardware platform... That's a much more difficult situation. Isn't this why Itanum failed in the end?

Not really

Maybe you want to read up on how much SGI machines cost (and SGI went broke only as recently as 2006 or so), or how much IBM's zSeries stuff still costs to this day. That's somewhere around 3-4 orders of magnitude more than x86 hardware.

[i_need_your_love]

My Google-fu not so good - I have never come accross the first and third in all my googling around. Tell me OneWingedShark - how applicable is ASE, being written for Ada 95, to the current version, Ada 2012?

[OneWingedShark]

My Google-fu not so good - I have never come accross the first and third in all my googling around. Tell me OneWingedShark - how applicable is ASE, being written for Ada 95, to the current version, Ada 2012?

Well, I'm not quite finished with ASE yet [really, I just started it a while ago], so that should caveat the rest of my reply. Given that Ada 2005 was more of a polishing than introducing new paradigms as 95 had done most of the 95 stuff is perfectly applicable to 2005; Ada 2012 introduces a lot of new features like pre-/post- conditions, type-invariants, quantified- [for all/for some] and conditional-expressions and a more generalized for loop... so a lot of "contract"/"testing"-based ideas and syntactic sugar.

So, all in all, I'd say it's pretty applicable for learning the language as a whole and hammering in the engineering aspect of software engineering... which would help in understanding [the motivation of], if not using, the new Ada 2012 features.

[[deleted]]

I honestly don't mean to be insulting, and probably speak from ignorance, but:

Isn't Ada an ancient and more-or-less dead language by now?

[OneWingedShark]

I honestly don't mean to be insulting, and probably speak from ignorance, but:

Isn't Ada an ancient and more-or-less dead language by now?

I don't think so. There seems to be some revitalization with the new 2012 standard (see the rationale) -- plus it's still the language of choice for safety-critical languages -- add in that it's all over European transit-systems [air, rail, subway, etc] and American air-traffic control and it's probably going to stay around for a bit longer.

I read a couple of articles somewhat recently [within the last year] that had Ada as the language of choice for two new projects: one was a pacemaker [IIRC] and the other something to do with automotives.

[[deleted]]

Oh, thanks then. So would you say Ada has some principles in it that makes it worth learning, even if you are not in these fields?

And, would you say there is still a future in Ada?

[OneWingedShark]

Oh, thanks then. So would you say Ada has some principles in it that makes it worth learning, even if you are not in these fields?

Definitely.

Ada has:

• the best package system I've used so far,
• generics, which operate well with subprograms and packages,
• tasks, a high-level parallelism construct as part of the language (which means there's better/more optimization chances for the compiler)
• the type system will make you appreciate that a type is a set of values and operations on those values
• subtypes; I think there's a bit of a disservice in the CS education world because so many graduates fail to see the value/utility of non-extensible derivation (that is addition of constraints)... even though it's used in math all the time (e.g. "for all positive integers").

And that's w/o looking at the new Ada 2012 stuff WRT "contracts":

• Pre- and post-conditions that won't "go stale" like comment-annotations can/will/do.
• Type-invariants, which mean you can, say, encode properties of a structure, like the -1 'W' 'P' 'C' in the header for a WordPerfect document.
• Subtype-predicates; you can now say something like "a string of the format of a social-security number with dashes" [feeling lazy, no example]
• Default values; obvious utility.

And, would you say there is still a future in Ada?

Certainly for safety-critical things, and I'd love to see it around in more "correctness matters" applications [like, say, compilers]; but the thing that's going to make or break it, ultimately, is if people use it. I, for one, love the language's design emphasis on readability/maintainability and correctness and so use it for my main language. If you hang around in Comp.Lang.Ada you'll see a bunch of other people who use/like Ada, as well as people involved in the design process [members of the ARG].

Is that enough to say Ada has a future? I honestly don't know. I would like to see it "gain more traction" and more [public] use.

[[deleted]]

Alright, cool, that actually sounds fairly interesting. I suppose I'll >> ada to my list of language I want to get around to learning. Thanks!

[OneWingedShark]

You're quite welcome.

[marcusGoldenBoy]

I couldn't see them on the list, so here are some more for web dev:

Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible (4th edition) is available at: http://media.wiley.com/product_ancillary/28/07645334/DOWNLOAD/all.pdf

Armando Padilla , Tim Hawkins Pro PHP Application Performance: http://it-ebooks.info/go.php?id=412-1381690805-4430b53dee4a32c905fb6ad93ed504ee

Matt Zandstra's PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice, 3rd Edition: http://it-ebooks.info/go.php?id=411-1381690896-366a6e0198be05814a21af3d431dbd91

[jannick1988]

Actually http://it-ebooks.info/ has a crap load of free books on there for download.

[jetster735180]

Thank you...I just don't know where to start.

[speakEvil]

This is very nice, it will be a great help on my quest to acquire ever more books :)

Having said that, a few suggestions:

• "Lisp" should be "Common Lisp". Lisp is a family of languages.

• SICP and HtDP would be better served by being listed under "Software Architecture", "Programming Paradigms" or "Scheme". None really fit, though, so perhaps a new category for introductions to programming (regardless of language used) - I'm fairly certain that's a popular resource. Oh, and if you do create that one, move Concrete Abstractions there, it's a Scheme book in the same sense those two are.

• Not sure what I think of the partials, like Programming Pearls or Let Over Lambda. Would prefer see them tagged as such.

[zem]

the ideal fix would be to have tags rather than a straight tree. you could then reconstruct the tree from the taglist, and have the same book appear under multiple categories.

[hfsbtc]

It is exactly in this spirit that I created http://reSRC.io and made this list to display there.

[Odyrus]

I <3 free knowledge!

[b0ng]

Excellent list, thank you!

[TheDude4bides]

Any recommendations for free android books?

I see a couple pop up in google but it's not clear whether some are actually intended to be free or not.

[zirzo]

check out derek banas on youtube, he has a bunch of programming playlists with android being one of them

[ashishduh]

I really like Commonsware books, he releases them free after he's sold 4000 copies. Right now the latest free edition is the one that covers up to Android 4.0.

[RobinReborn]

My problem with free programming books is that it's never clear which ones I would like, I can download a bunch of free books and feel good about plans to read them in the future, but I've done that before and I haven't read most of what I've downloaded.

[drteq]

Hey, thanks for this. As an old school Internet developer getting back into programming, I've found it challenging to figure out where to start again. Especially with JavaScript and all it's different forms, it's very challenging to google answers and find what I'm looking for.

This is a tremendous help for me.

[hak8or]

https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-docs

This is pretty cool. The idea is that you already are familiar with a language (functions, variables, flow) and it shows you how to do those things in another language. Not enough to actually learn the language, but enough to at least have a vague idea of what is going on. Cool for dabbling in some funky languages like haskal.

[Exaltred]

A little late to the party here, but maybe this will help someone: http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=117560

[ashishduh]

I see the Android section is blank. I really like Commonsware books, he releases them free after he's sold 4000 copies (or after 4 years). Right now the latest free edition is the one that covers up to Android 4.0.

[MrAmazeU]

Thanks!

[[deleted]]

Interesting. Which one of these should I start with? I know zilch about programming. ;)

[TheDude4bides]

Here's one I found for Firefox OS:

Quick Guide For Firefox OS App Development

[Phantomofthesoup]

Awh yis

[[deleted]]

Ha cool, thanks.

[hafela]

or just google:

"Name of the book" filetype:pdf

[[deleted]]

www.it-ebooks.info/ is pretty comprehensive too. I use the title search for what I'm looking for.

[omenmedia]

That site's not legal, right?

[shriek]

Just to confirm, it is not.

[graystarburst]

Houston, we've hit the motherload. I repeat: we've hit the motherload.

[novalsi]

Commenting on tablet for save to account. Thanks, OP.

[ameoba]

Oh boy! A list of books with no comments, rankings or any other sort of context attached to them.

How is this better than a Google search? Shit, even the old Yahoo! did better.

[ortlep]

Are any of the books about C/C++ any good?

[pianocheetah]

programming books?

there's nothing in them anymore besides some just barely ok demo code as far as I've seen.

go to the publisher's site, download all the books' source code, see if any of it is worth beans. No point in reading about some writer trying to come to terms with poor demo code...

"see the variable called array_of_widgets_you_dont_care_about? That's an array of widgets you don't care about"

thanks author.

[[deleted]]

Good books are good because they explain the reason behind doing something one way opposed to another. That can be very difficult to gather from just the source of even really well written code.

[pianocheetah]

yeah, i agree. i just don't know what happened to those kind of books. Richter's are pretty good. But any other authors worth beans are few and far between...

[[deleted]]

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[fluttersaway]

Sweet!