Is there some sort of announcement from Springer about this? Specifically, one in which they state what the license is, e.g., CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or something like that? I'll bet they attached either the No-Derivs (ND) or Non-Commercial (NC) limitations, though -- would love to be wrong about that. In the PDFs I've looked at so far, they didn't bother to change the copyright statement at the front of the book, so they still all appear to be under traditional restrictive copyright, whatever new terms Springer intends notwithstanding.
Well, right now it's still technically illegal to download them, unless & until Springer actually says some different license. Not that anyone would be prosecuted, obviously; one could clearly claim that it was obvious that Springer intended to distribute them at the very least for personal non-commercial use, even if Springer didn't say so explicitly anywhere. If the terms are even more liberal than that, so much the better... But it ain't so till Springer says it's so :-).
there is somewhat of a difference between "purchasing something for 0.00 with appropriate distribution after creating an account at a webshop" and "torrenting a pdf"
It isn't, assuming Springer doesn't have contracts with author precluding it. Springer is either the copyright holder or is authorised to distribute, and they are explicitly making the works available for download. You don't need any additional permission.
Any license changes they publish are important to establish your right to make any subsequent copies, though.
"You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content."
> SpringerOpen books are published under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so they can be reused and redistributed for non-commercial purposes as long as the original author is attributed.
SpringerOpen is not what's being talking about here. There are only a few dozen books listed in that page. I don't think any of the books being referenced in the comments is there.
That page isn't a complete listing, but you're right, only ~100 of the books seem to be properly open access, unfortunately. I guess Springer can decide to revoke access to the rest at any point in the future.
One of the best of these is Holub on Patterns [1], which is IMO the best book for learning patterns. How to implement patterns, how to know which ones to use where, and how to use them in combination. Excellent, clear tutorial. Implementation language is Java.
Slight tangent: if one is interested in design patterns, consider reading the book "A Pattern Language", 1977 by Christopher Alexander et al. It's the original patterns book, for architecture.
Continuing tangent: if that sounds interesting, please consider also reading the precursor book "The Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher Alexander. It focuses on the theory and the philosophy. This is a beautiful book, in both senses of the beauty of the book itself, and the beauty of the ideas contained inside. It is very humane.
"There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills,and as our faces are."
It wouldn't hurt to have more humane and beautiful things in the world, particularly those that are designed and built and customised by those who must inhabit or use them. Whether those things are buildings, or software, or laws, or societal goals.
"Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics", published at least 10 years ago. Higher signal to noise if you're just looking to pick up some field of mathematics.
You just made my personal day and ruined my office day :-). I'll now spend rest of the day, and perhaps week, drooling over, downloading (and uploading them to my DropBox account) a whole bunch of these :-)
This is great - I've been looking for a good series to have on hand when I want to dive deeper into a math field on an as-needed basis. For example, the Linear Algebra one could be really useful if I decide to get deeper into any Machine Learning stuff - http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1670-4
It's possible to do things with statistics/ML even without having the greatest grasp on linear algebra, but it sure would help to have a firmer foundation. Thanks!
Although I have not read that book, for linear algebea I would highly recommend Gilbert Strang's book. It's one of the few textbooks for which I would pay full price, even today. Also, his lectures are available on youtube from MIT, and he's quite good.
Very cool. They've got one book in Italian, and I just started learning, maybe after my easy Berlitz, I'll try to learn some Italian and refresh some Mathematics at the same time.
Maybe you already know this, but I think the phrase you're looking for is "right off the bat". I'm not really sure where it comes from though. Just thought you might want some stranger on the internet to correct your usage of idioms (seriously though; I'm not trying to be a dick, just trying to share some knowledge).
Time Series Analysis and Its Applications by Shumway and Stoffer (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3261-0), who developed the EM tools for fitting state space models to time series by maximum likelihood, but were largely uncredited by the NIPS crowd.
This was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800881, but another thread seems like a good idea, so more people can know about this. The intellectual riches available here are incredible.
"Formulas, Facts and Constants for Students and Professionals in Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics" by Helmut and Kurt Fischbeck. Just download it now and thank me later. http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-72555-5
The Things You Should Never Do, Part One by Joel Spolsky should be mandatory reading for every tech executive.[1] Springer might add more value to the texts by enabling Medium style side comments on an HTML version for readers to either ask for help or for experts to clarify and extend. Use the job posting business model to post jobs in the comments in specific disciplines of the texts to create revenue.
I downloaded the HTML of the page. Out in the middle of the text is a really simple version of the full list easy to work with in an editor. I got a list of the PDFs I'd like (basically nearly all the analysis and applied math and nearly none of the algebra or topology, and set up a script with the famous CURL to do the downloads to file names I'd picked out, etc.
But their Web server rejected, "closed", all the CURL connections. I tried some really simple software I had based just on sockets, and those connections were closed also. My Web browser connects and downloads the file one at a time just fine.
So, maybe I need a newer version of CURL that looks more like a Web browser?
Or just use Firefox, manually, one PDF at a time. Bummer.
One of the things I've realized just a few days ago was that we need better technology to absorb content efficiently.
There are so many books out there that I want to read, but might never be able to read because I will not have enough time. It would be amazing if there was just a way to download a book and understand its contents right into my brain in a matter of minutes.
Matter of minutes might never be possible or even desirable. But I do think learning can be done much more efficiently with the right tools. Working on that on my side projects ;) It comes down to good old note taking and expressing what you have learned in your own words or code.
One technique I have been thinking of is to use AI/NLP to automatically generate questions from the text. It might not know the answer, but it doesn't have it.
The technology is evolving in that way, sort of. We have tools for content analysis and one of such analysis is text summarization. It would be extremely useful if text summarizators would become developed enough to be of any practical use. To be able to easily create a summary for the entire book, then if you're interested - for the individual chapters, and so on, each time in various volume/detail according to your time constraint and degree of interest. Pretty much like a zoom function you do on a very high resolution image.
What is the status of that speed reading app? It would display each word in the middle of the screen if I remember correctly, and by that way you could speed up reading a lot. I don't remember the name. Maybe not recommended for a good novel, and I don't know if it would really help in reading a book with difficult content, but still.
Reading speed is rarely the bottleneck in reading textbooks, just as typing speed is rarely the bottleneck in coding. In fact, I found that strictly limiting my reading speed, e.g. by forcing myself to spend at least two minutes on a page before turning over, has greatly helped me to understand texts better and more thoroughly.
Actually, novels are the only part where I could see some value from speed-reading, as the plot is usually not all that difficult to follow and at least in most cases the language not nice enough to marvel at it, though I suppose the latter is what you meant by “good novel”.
Last time I had to absorb content efficiently I went for Kindle and their text-to-speech set at faster pace. I followed the robot's voice by reading the book myself and writing down a summary sentence / keywords per every page read.
This way it took me a day (from early morning to late night) to read a 400 pages long Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2" and write a review. Next day I managed to get highest score at the relevant exam. It kind of makes sense that reading + writing + listening allows one to deeply absorb content and probably is the best combination so far.
It would be really interesting to see an interactive textbook that is combined with audiobook and asks you to read along and summarise every chapter. Not only it would increase speed of reading, but also help with memorising content.
> It kind of makes sense that reading + writing + listening allows one to deeply absorb content and probably is the best combination so far.
This is probably one of the best ideas I read on HN this year. It just seems to match up very well with my own study experiences, and the advice I have read recently in 'A Mind for Numbers' http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G3L19ZU
That's what the idea behind IBM Watson is, because he can read much faster than any human and you can ask him anything without knowing anything about it yourself and he will give you an answer based on all books and scientific papers he was able to read until that point...only problems are a) you have to trust the evaluation and conclusions of a computer (better the programmer of the algorithms maybe) because b) probably nobody can verify the definite correctness or wrongness of an answer, because nobody has been able to study and to read as much about a topic as him. Exciting technology that is. And exciting times we are living in where computers start "knowing" more about any given topic than a human is able to about one single area and starts answering our questions about them...!
178 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] thread-Karl
Still, that's pretty cool!
--edit: apologies, should be a response to parent
Any license changes they publish are important to establish your right to make any subsequent copies, though.
"You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content."
[1]: http://link.springer.com/termsandconditions
Edit: It’s still a Very Good Thing.
> SpringerOpen books are published under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so they can be reused and redistributed for non-commercial purposes as long as the original author is attributed.
Edit: looks like they've revoked access already in fact https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10811854
[1] http://goo.gl/DKFzCe
Continuing tangent: if that sounds interesting, please consider also reading the precursor book "The Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher Alexander. It focuses on the theory and the philosophy. This is a beautiful book, in both senses of the beauty of the book itself, and the beauty of the ideas contained inside. It is very humane.
"There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills,and as our faces are."
It wouldn't hurt to have more humane and beautiful things in the world, particularly those that are designed and built and customised by those who must inhabit or use them. Whether those things are buildings, or software, or laws, or societal goals.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0195024028
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheTimelessWayOfBuilding
http://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%2...
http://link.springer.com/search?facet-series=%22666%22&facet...
You just made my personal day and ruined my office day :-). I'll now spend rest of the day, and perhaps week, drooling over, downloading (and uploading them to my DropBox account) a whole bunch of these :-)
It's possible to do things with statistics/ML even without having the greatest grasp on linear algebra, but it sure would help to have a firmer foundation. Thanks!
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-55631-9
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6383-8 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-30241-1
Looked like great reads right off the bad. Thanks OP!
Tim Budd's "An APL Compiler" is a classic.
I love the goofy title of Mads Tofte's: "Compiler Generators What They Can Do, What They Might Do, and What They Will Probably Never Do"
Paid a handsome amount for these and many others at Reiter's Books back in the day!
Optimization by Lange is at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-4182-7
Time Series Analysis and Its Applications by Shumway and Stoffer (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3261-0), who developed the EM tools for fitting state space models to time series by maximum likelihood, but were largely uncredited by the NIPS crowd.
MPEG Video Compression Standard:
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884
Chaos and Fractals:
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624
Proofs from THE BOOK:
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-05412-3
Joel on Software:
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5
Programming Challenges:
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97559
Data Compression
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97635
[1] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4302-0753-5_2...
The corrected link from page 316 (bottom) - hilarious: http://web.archive.org/web/20001203002400/http://microsoft.c...
Page 325 talks about the porting effort which didn't work out, and the Wasabi language was born: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz#History
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
(While I know they charge like this for most of their e-books, this particular example is embarrassing.)
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b115884
It says restricted to me and offers me to buy chapter for
$29.95 and whole book for $229.00
But their Web server rejected, "closed", all the CURL connections. I tried some really simple software I had based just on sockets, and those connections were closed also. My Web browser connects and downloads the file one at a time just fine.
So, maybe I need a newer version of CURL that looks more like a Web browser?
Or just use Firefox, manually, one PDF at a time. Bummer.
There are so many books out there that I want to read, but might never be able to read because I will not have enough time. It would be amazing if there was just a way to download a book and understand its contents right into my brain in a matter of minutes.
Actually, novels are the only part where I could see some value from speed-reading, as the plot is usually not all that difficult to follow and at least in most cases the language not nice enough to marvel at it, though I suppose the latter is what you meant by “good novel”.
It would be really interesting to see an interactive textbook that is combined with audiobook and asks you to read along and summarise every chapter. Not only it would increase speed of reading, but also help with memorising content.
This is probably one of the best ideas I read on HN this year. It just seems to match up very well with my own study experiences, and the advice I have read recently in 'A Mind for Numbers' http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G3L19ZU
Thanks, I shall try this!
Besides Machine Learning and some niche topics most books on the list should be very useful and applicable
Intertwingled, about Ted Nelson, 2014:
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5