Free Programing Books

Posted3 months agoActive2 months ago

fmfamaral

195 points

38 comments

github.comTechstory

calmpositive

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ProgrammingFree ResourcesReading Habits

Key topics

Programming

Free Resources

Reading Habits

A GitHub repository of free programming books is shared, sparking discussion on reading habits and the value of free resources.

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01Story posted
Oct 18, 2025 at 11:59 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Oct 18, 2025 at 1:00 PM EDT
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34 comments in 0-12h
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Oct 25, 2025 at 11:32 PM EDT
2 months ago
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Discussion (38 comments)

Showing 38 comments

piskov

3 months ago

3 replies

Tsundoku (積ん読) 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

3 months ago

1 reply

Nice!

Taleb calls it the anti-library

yulker

3 months ago

2 replies

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

f1shy

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

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.

treetalker

3 months ago

Research tool!

dunham

3 months ago

3 replies

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

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

Pretty much that. If the only copy I can find is .mobi.. or, occasionally perhaps, just by mistake.

dotancohen

3 months ago

2 replies

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

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

Thank you

dunham

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

Thank you

ternaryoperator

3 months ago

1 reply

Why do you make PDFs of github checkouts?

dunham

3 months ago

I meant that I have repositories checked out of github that contain pdf files. Most repositories that I check out of github are in ~/code, which I back up in case it disappears upstream. But it does look like a lot of those files actually are academic papers.

pessimizer

3 months ago

2 replies

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

3 months ago

2 replies

  > 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

3 months ago

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

3 months ago

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

3 months ago

>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

3 months ago

1 reply

Programming*

fmfamaralAuthor

3 months ago

1 reply

Jtsummers

3 months ago

If you can't edit it anymore, email the mods. Their contact is at the bottom of the page.

globular-toast

3 months ago

2 replies

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.

mandeepj

3 months ago

1 reply

> 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.

mandeepj

3 months ago

can't believe sharing a personal learning experience would hurt someone! Snowflakes!!

NoMoreNicksLeft

3 months ago

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.

mystraline

3 months ago

1 reply

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.

kjs3

3 months ago

1 reply

Go to libgen.ac. Searched for '68030', because I'm playing with one. Zero books found. So, no, far less than "nearly every book".

mystraline

3 months ago

1 reply

https://libgen.li/index.php?req=68030&columns%5B%5D=t&column...

So, libgen.li .

kjs3

2 months ago

That search returns 10 items. I own more physical copies of 68030 related books than that search returns. Bonus: none of those 10 items are books. I'll stick to Anna's or the rest that actually index useful stuff.

InMice

3 months ago

Good list. Would be nice to add more metadata like publication year

AfterHIA

3 months ago

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 b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?

Qem

3 months ago

The Pharo site has a section with several free books on the language: https://books.pharo.org/

OutOfHere

3 months ago

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

3 months ago

Code Complete by Steve McConnell is a very good one.

Edn. 1 is better than Edn. 2.

All, IMO.

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