
Humble Book Bundle: The Joy of Coding - Tomte
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/joy-of-coding-book-bundle
======
qwertyuiop924
Having read several of these, I know they're good.

LYAH and LYSE are both VERY good. Like, really, really good. They are free,
but if they weren't, they'd make this bundle worth it on their own.

Likewise, The Land of Lisp and The Realm of Racket are great if you want to
_think_ like a Lisper/Schemer. TLOL, however, is a better book, covering (I
think) more stuff. TROR also suffers a library dependance, but I don't
especially LIKE Racket, so take this with a grain of salt.

If Hemmingway Wrote Javascript is an excellent exploration. You'll see a
variety of code, some good, some bad, some smart, some dumb, and all of it
mind-expanding and entertaining. It demonstrates Javascript's remarkable
flexability, and argues that there is no one way to write good JS: you should
use the right tool for the job. It doesn't substantiate this well, but it's
fun all the same.

I've heard good things about EQJS, and Write Good Code looks interesting, but
I haven't read any of them, so I cannot pass judgement.

But honestly, most of NoStarch's stuff is pretty good. Not as consistently
good as O'Reilley, but their best stuff is better than O'Reilley, although not
as good as MITPress.

Seriously, if you're ever in Camebridge, visit the MITPress bookstore. It's
full of good books, Has excellent staff, and sells off slightly damaged books
at discounts that aren't even funny. And even without the discount, it's much
cheaper than buying their stuff online.

/shameless-plug

~~~
avindroth
Hijacking top comment, haskellbook.com did more wonders for me than LYAH. HN
fawns over that book, surprised it isn't already mentioned.

The book is also a pedagogical feat.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I'm top comment? Jeez.

Anyways, yeah, I'd never heard of HFFP before now, and don't have the spare
cash to check it out. It seems neat, though.

~~~
codygman
The authors encourages anyone that can't afford the book to contact them
through their support link on the Haskellbook.com site to work something fair
out.

------
loco5niner
Elequent Javascript is already free online
([http://eloquentjavascript.net/](http://eloquentjavascript.net/)) and a HUGE
feature is using it's built in REPL to immediately play with the code samples.
That is lost in PDF format.

~~~
TheGRS
Automate the Boring Stuff is also free online:
[https://automatetheboringstuff.com/](https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

~~~
jlgaddis
Damn, I just bought it a few months ago too (spur-of-the-moment when it popped
up on Amazon as a recommendation). Perhaps I'll get around to reading more
than just the front and back covers someday. :/

------
yojex
I would gladly pay for a higher tier (at least $50) that ships you physical
copies of these books.

~~~
bphogan
I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies. But
over the years, I've noticed (for the books I have written and edited), print
copies sharply declined and ebook copies sharply went up. It's to the point
where I don't even know why we bother doing paper anymore.

I prefer digital because I can send out updated copies of the books to readers
for free, which I can't do on paper. And programming stuff changes so
frequently.

So I guess I'm saying if you want print books, you should make that known by
buying physical copies of books. Cos if the trends I see continues, I can't
imagine it'll be practical to do print tech books too far into the future.

~~~
marvindanig
> I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies.

It's hilarious that people in tech clamor for physical books, even at the cost
of trees, environment, poor accessibility, poor maintainability, poor
upgradability and poor portability. I suspect it is because of the sucky
"format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par reading experience. And the fact that
ebooks are still not a _first class citizen_ of the web I agree that these
trends will continue. And that's exactly what publishers would want. To be
able to make more money!

~~~
cyphar
> > I love that there are many people on here clamoring for physical copies.

> even at the cost of trees, environment,

We grow trees to make paper. That's how the paper industry works. Nobody
complains about us devastating "virgin potato fields" because we use potatoes
to make chips. But the logic is precisely the same. There are more trees
_today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry (as well as tree
planting efforts). So if we stopped using paper cold-turkey, we would remove
the financial incentive for companies to plant more trees.

> I suspect it is because of the sucky "format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par
> reading experience.

For me the real issue is the licensing. I think that it is intolerable that a
company can claim that you don't own ebooks. It's a slap in the face to
traditional freedoms of readers and is incredibly chilling. Amazon deleting
copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a
precedent that should be taken very seriously. Not to mention that their
product line is _literally_ named after fire-related terms (perhaps
subconsciously implying the purpose of the products is virtual book burning)!
You couldn't make this stuff up.

Companies that sell PDFs which are licensed under free licenses are much
better, but the other issues you mentioned still mean I probably won't buy
ebooks for a while. I prefer physical pages.

~~~
marvindanig
> For me the real issue is the licensing.

Sure. Wanting to own physical books to avoid issues of broken licensing model
or issues of service centralization _isn 't_ the same thing as wanting
physical books _because_ dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their
electronic counterparts.

The latter is simply untrue, only a means to hijack industry standards, sell
propaganda, and profit from it.

IMHO, electronic books can easily have a great reading experience (much, much
better) if only books/manuscripts related software was let in the open for
people to innovate upon. Or made a part of the web, a first class citizen,
with decentralization, accessibility etc.

I pretty much agree with you that existing options have a lot of _deliberate_
problems but do not think that the solution to all of those is in physical
books. I'd rather push for books and web being coalesced into a single unified
resource that is both accessible and _open_.

My friend & I even started a community/foundation that we plan to build on
some of these ideas:

[https://bubbl.in/about](https://bubbl.in/about)

> Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the
> planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously.

I hadn't heard about this before! And what's even worse is that Amazon was
allowed to acquire the .book TLD and with that own a very very large piece of
"public property" for _peanuts_. I guess there was very little reportage by
media on this. But then such is life lately.

> There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper
> industry…

That's an interesting thread to go after. My tryst with physical books was
almost a decade ago, and the industry I knew locally then was quite different
from what you describe here. If the world gives up on ebooks like the talk of
the town is lately, I'm pretty sure there will be an "impact" that would no
longer hide under the design of industry.

~~~
cyphar
> because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic
> counterparts.

I'll be honest, I prefer physical books. The smell, the feel of turning real
pages, the fact that I can write all over them, the fact you don't need to
charge them. These are things that you can't emulate with an ebook. Are they
subjective? Yes. Are there things that are easier with ebooks? Hell yes.

However, I _feel_ that I learn things better when I read from a book than when
I read from a screen. I'm not sure why (and I've heard there's been studies on
this) but maybe it's got to do with how I grew up learning -- lots of book
reading in weird positions on my couch (I like lying upside down with my head
on the floor if I'm _really_ into a book).

------
veli_joza
I really like this bundle! I think all previous book bundles were comics, so
it's great to see tech literature represented.

Also, I think the choice languages is really good. F#, Clojure, R, Lisp,
Haskell, Racket, Erlang... it's great to see all these paradigms represented.
I can't speak for books themselves, but I think it's awesome that this book
pack will reach the Humble bundles audience.

~~~
kayla210
There was a security/malware book bundle a good while back that had some
interesting books in it. Sadly, I keep forgetting that I got that bundle and
haven't read any of them, but I know one book in the bundle was used for a
malware analysis class at my university at some point. I'm definitely going to
get this bundle and remember to download and read the malware books I got.

~~~
Jayakumark
I wanted to buy the hacker bundle but missed it somehow, atleast i found this
one now.

~~~
kayla210
I went and looked back at the Hacking bundle and there's some books that
overlap into this one, such as the command line and some of the Python books.

------
MollyR
For the poorer hackernews users. some of those books are free online anyways.

ex [http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php](http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php)

~~~
UncleSam
And:
[https://automatetheboringstuff.com/](https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

~~~
pawadu
You guys just listed the only 3 books I found interesting in the bundle...

I like the charity bit however, so I am going to donate the money directly to
this bundles charity organization (which happens to be EFF hence ->
[https://supporters.eff.org/donate/button](https://supporters.eff.org/donate/button)
)

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matthistuff
Here's a handy one liner to grab all links from the downloads page and save a
curl command to the clipboard:

    
    
      copy('curl ' + Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('a')).filter(a => String(a.search).indexOf('gamekey') > 0).map(a => '-o ' + a.pathname.substr(1) + ' ' + a.getAttribute('href')).join(' '))
    

Should work reasonably in most recent browsers.

~~~
dylanfw
As someone suggested on Reddit, download _Automate the Boring Things_ and
learn to automate the rest of the downloads.

------
diggan
Wow, an extreme book bundle. Happy to see and instant buy from me, especially
since it's drm-free and in many formats!

Myself, I've already read Clojure for the Brave and True and also the Eloquent
JavaScript so I can recommend the bundle just because of those two. Currently
reading Land of Lisp which is good as well but haven't finished so hard to
comment on.

But, for the price of $15, it would be hard not to buy this.

------
philippeback
Ok, let's bite. Looks like a good way to support a charity anyway.

------
clavalle
The 'Write Great Code' series is worth the price of admission by itself.

I think a lot of folks who want to really know what they are doing that
weren't fortunate enough to grow their skills in a time that forced you to
understand the machine through to high level could could benefit from those
two books immensely.

------
sotojuan
I'm reading LYSE right now and it's very good, worth whatever you end up
paying for it!

~~~
droopybuns
Well, I'm curious. Which one is "LYSE"?

~~~
sotojuan
Sorry—Learn You Some Erlang!

------
ddavidn
I'm definitely going to buy this, start reading three books and finish none.

------
_kst_
Is there a way to download the entire bundle as a zip file or tarball? (I
probably should have asked that before downloading each file individually.)

~~~
riboflava
Maybe the Python automation book covers automated downloads, or maybe the CLI
book will cover it.... =P Or there's always [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/downthemall/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/downthemall/)

------
shostack
As an "early" hobbyist Ruby/RoR programmer, would people recommend the first
tier for beginners looking to expand their horizons with Python and Haskell
specifically?

Also, how painful will these be to read on a Kindle Paperwhite? I've tried
other coding books on there and the code block styling was impossible to make
out.

~~~
adimitrov
There's no way to recommend LYAH enough. I learned Haskell way back when with
'A Gentle Introduction to Haskell' which was all but. I'm jealous of kids
these days actually having fantastic material to work with.

Note that LYAH is also free online. I don't know about the Python book, as I
don't do Python very much.

------
n0us
FYI check the promotions tab in Gmail if you're missing the email.

------
AStellersSeaCow
Sorry, I only using functional programming for nefarious reason.

------
the_watcher
This is pretty cool. A bunch of resources I've either been meaning to pick up
or am pretty excited to check out.

------
znpy
Don't forget to choose which charity will benefit from your donation!

------
ThinkBeat
This is a great collection of books. Many that I already own and love :)

Thanks

------
douche
Damn, I just bought the F# book...

------
pbreit
And this is why bundling destroys a la carte for zero-marginal-cost items.

~~~
shostack
Can you elaborate on this?

~~~
bpicolo
Pretty sure he means that bundling performs very well for items that don't
cost extra to produce more of (in this case, digital content). Distributing
more PDFs costs effectively nothing.

People can feel like they get a lot of value for little money, without the
sellers explicitly losing.

