HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

224 points by Esox ↗ HN
I recently stumbled across a link in another thread to "Economics in One Lesson" and thought it was incredibly interesting. https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economics%20in%20One%20Lesson_2.pdf

What are some other interesting reads—whether PDF, website, doc, etc—that are freely available?

One of my favorites that I find thought-provoking is the "Procedural Content Generation in Games" book (http://pcgbook.com/).

135 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] thread
iheredia
The Nature of Code is one of my favorites free reads http://natureofcode.com/book/ It addresses topics from physics and math, and how to apply them to your code to make it more natural
nilkn
I love "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces":

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

Really useful book and really accessible (both because it's available for free and also because it's written with a lot of skill and friendliness towards the reader).

I recommend it in particular to those who for whatever reason never took an operating systems class (e.g., you were self-taught or didn't major in CS). This book will really demystify a lot of stuff for you without overwhelming you at the same time.

gshrikant
I second this recommendation. Not being a CS major I didn't take an OS course so I worked through the first part of the OSTEP book and found it to be very well-written and much less intimidating.

I haven't finished reading it entirely yet and didn't do any of the labs but I liked the big picture approach it took to OS design.

mangeletti
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (754pp) - http://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf

The Condensed Wealth of Nations (86pp) - http://www.adamsmith.org/sites/default/files/resources/conde...

snksnk
Some related readings:

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) - http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMSCover.html

Adam Smith's Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (1763) - http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2621 (warning: long page)

Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) - http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1365 (warning: long page)

Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726) - http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hutcheson-an-inquiry-into-... (warning: long page)

waqf
If your preferred book isn't available for free, it usually means you haven't tried at Library Genesis.
ericssmith
How to Design Programs 2E

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

This book is much more than the intro to programming that it appears to be. It is a foundational approach for producing robust programs, regardless of your implementation language or level of experience.

gandalfu
Unfortunately it looks like the authors never completed the next book on the series about real time programming. How to design worlds. http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/
ericssmith
Thanks for pointing this out. I was interested to see they credit Paul Hudak's "Haskell School of Expression" for inspiration. I will have to take a fresh look at that given my newfound appreciation of HTDP (due to stumbling across Norman Ramsey's assessment of it). Also need to look deeper into Hudak's FRP now that I think about it.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
readthisthing_
We send a daily newsletter with one really interesting thing to read. Here are the past 40 or so that we've sent: http://readthisthing.com/archive

I think you're more talking about books, but still thought this might be relevant to what you're after.

gandalfu
"The Macroscope" by Joël de Rosnay, a book on the systems approach

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/macrbook.html

This book is an excellent, easy to read introduction to cybernetics and systems thinking, with applications to living organisms, the economy and the world as a whole. The main theme is that the complex systems which govern our life should be looked at as a whole, rather than be taken apart into their constituents. The different systems, processes and mechanisms are beautifully illustrated with examples and pictures.

Although the text is over 20 years old, this visionary document is still highly relevant to our present situation and state of knowledge.

It is particularly recommended to people who wish to get an understanding of the basic concepts and applications of systems theory and cybernetics.

MistahKoala
Thanks for this - wasn't expecting to see a systems book pop up in this thread!
AndrewOMartin
Some classic poems, they're short, but you'll find yourself rereading the ones that really engage you occasionally throughout your life. Here's some I found to be immediately accessible, to get you going.

Poe's Raven - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178713 Dulce et Decorum Est - http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html The Charge of the Light Brigade - http://poetry.eserver.org/light-brigade.html

mindcrime
It's funny, I never cared much for poetry until I started listening to Iron Maiden and found out that "The Trooper" is based on "The Charge of the Light Brigade", as well as "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" being based on a Samuel Taylor Coleridge work.

Now I enjoy reading both Coleridge and Tennyson quite a lot (as well as a few other poets, although it will never be my primary interest).

And people used to say that heavy metal was bad for kids... feh.

tjradcliffe
In the other direction, I never understood rap until I studied Anglo-Saxon poetry. It has the same muscular rhythms and concern for status and manliness. I'd love to see a rapper do Beowulf!
icbat
http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

An example-driven guide to design patterns used in Games. Some overlap in to more general design patterns, but it provides especially tangible examples for those, too.

okal
I built http://hackershelf.com just for this. It's a crowdsourced listing of legally free books on just about any topic.
crshults
Thanks for this. I was happy to see 'Patterns for Time-Triggered Embedded Systems' on your list, though the link appears broken - new link: [1]. I remember working through that book and porting everything from C to Assembly (my boss at the time was too cheap to buy me the nice Keil compiler). Once I had that library in hand, I was knocking out his projects in days instead of weeks.

[1] http://www.safetty.net/download/pont_pttes_2014.pdf

okal
As with any proper crowdsourced website, you can edit broken links yourself ;-)
Istof
also, to prevent conflicts of interests, sometimes it is better if someone else does it for you
Winterflow3r
thanks! this is really cool!
okal
You're welcome. Glad you like it :-)
anthony_romeo
I love this. I'll be signing up.

Just one thing, browsing by topic doesn't seem to have any sort of rhyme or reason in its ordering aside from some vague first-letter ordering. For example, there are numerous "I" categories, with one "I" for "interactive" and another one for "Interactive". One grouping of "I"'s includes tags "ios", "iOS", and "ip", but the next "I" grouping below just contains "IP"

Edit: I see the ordering issue now. There's a list of topics. The list is printed out in alphabetical order. But for some reason when the first letter of a topic changes between capital letter and a lowercase letter, a new letter grouping is created. Probably it's creating a new category whenever the first character changes, but it did not take into account capital and lowercase characters being different.

okal
Thank you. I'm not actively maintaining it anymore, TBH, but I've been getting bug reports/feature requests lately [meaning actual people still use it] so it might be time to reconsider that stance.
mkaziz
It sounds like if you open source the code, you could get some pull requests pretty easily.
EFruit
In the past month or so I've been using it astoundingly often. I really enjoy having such a site available and I appreciate the generosity of it all, but it could really (IMHO) use a cleanup. Perhaps a pass over the book URLs for 404s, cleaning/merging the duplicate categories, and perhaps a more rigorous way of preventing them from happening again (suggesting existing topics on the submit form?) I'm sure there are plenty of people here that would be happy to contribute content, code, design, or whatever.
benev
Warning: Shameless self promotion.

LinuxVoice magazine is available for free nine months after publication. The issues can be found here: http://www.linuxvoice.com/creative-commons-issues/

Quite a bit of our content is about programming and tech in general, so you may find something you like even if you're not a Linux user.

jsingleton
Linux Voice is very good although I haven't read these issues for over 9 months! Keep up the good work guys.
cooper12
Wow, CC BY-SA (Share-alike) and not CC BY-NC-SA (Non Commercial) like I expected. I commend you guys for believing in your publishing model and vision by taking that risk.