
Free Textbooks from Springer, Categorised - hnarayanan
https://hnarayanan.github.io/springer-books/
======
abnry
This sort of thing literally brings out the starving aggressive animal in me.
I get so frantic trying to download all I can!

Very, very surprising to me, one of the free books turns out to be directly
related to my new job (like, my boss's PhD advisor wrote the book).

~~~
entha_saava
Can I introduce you to library genesis? Or, if you don't like piracy, upenn's
online books Page?

~~~
noir_lord
That would definitely be a form of Nerd Sniping[1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/356/](https://xkcd.com/356/)

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jph
Thank you! Here's your list as a text file, which may be helpful for people
who like text.

[https://gist.github.com/joelparkerhenderson/11dfdb4bdeb3403b...](https://gist.github.com/joelparkerhenderson/11dfdb4bdeb3403b6fa3d4de7878bfde)

~~~
mathnmusic
Thanks for posting this. I imported all these books into a collection at
LearnAwesome.org:
[https://learnawesome.org/users/8a16a2e4-dcb7-4167-a2a2-51d3a...](https://learnawesome.org/users/8a16a2e4-dcb7-4167-a2a2-51d3af9d1613/collections/6f9b4ec2-9968-432b-86f6-f4c0b66542b3)

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tzs
In the math books, a gem is "Proofs from THE BOOK" [1].

[1]
[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-662-57265-8](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-662-57265-8)

~~~
xkgt
I just lost my morning skimming through this book. It looks like there are a
lot of other good books among this collection.

It won't be possible to go through all, but are there are any recommendations
from HN? Personally, I have come across Elements of Statistical Learning[1],
Recommender Systems[2], The Algorithm Design Manual[3] in many recommended
lists.

1\.
[http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-0-387-8...](http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-0-387-84858-7)

2\.
[http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-3-319-2...](http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-3-319-29659-3)

3\.
[http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-1-84800...](http://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-1-84800-070-4)

~~~
vector_spaces
If I'm not mistaken Elements of Statistical Learning and all other books by
the authors are already available for free on their website

[https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/pub.htm](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/pub.htm)

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elric
Somewhat off topic, but I've never had much luck with digital textbooks. For
some reason dead tree makes it much easier for me to actually pick up a book
and start working through it. Does anyone else have this problem? :-/

~~~
abhgh
Same here ... for technical textbooks that I really need to focus on, dead
tree is better. Esp if the content is math-y, scribbling notes, underlining
etc seem to amplify learning.I bought a printer just for printing out such
content so I can read and scribble away.

I wonder if this is something people of all age-groups universally feel, or do
kids today have no problem grokking hardcore technical details from ebooks.

~~~
amelius
> I bought a printer just for printing out such content so I can read and
> scribble away.

You might want to buy a cheap hot glue binding machine as well, or use the one
at your local library or university.

~~~
abhgh
That is a good suggestion, thanks, but usually I am very particular about
printing specific pages: the part of me that doesn't like reading such texts
on a device is typically at loggerheads with the part of me that doesn't like
print paper ending up in recycle bins :-) ... its a very real struggle ...

Anyone here with experience with Remarkable? Maybe thats the answer?

~~~
hirako2000
remarkable v1 user here. The pdf/epub reading experience is not perfect,
turning page is a bit distracting as the screen refreshes with all sort of
artifact for nearly 1 second,but the can't beat the ink factor. And can
annotate. I prefer it to the kindle to read because it's larger.

~~~
abhgh
Thank you for the helpful review!

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TeMPOraL
Kudos for the author for making the list more accessible!

> _and expects you to download some Excel sheet to figure out what they have
> on offer_

TBH, Excel isn't all that bad UX; the list is simultaneously more complete,
more dense and faster to read than the web equivalent. I'd love it if there
was an element in HTML for displaying modern data tables directly in the
browser (with the ability to sort and pivot them).

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jl2718
It amazes and upsets me to see so much knowledge in non-STEM areas, because
it’s being completely ignored. Seriously, does anybody have even the slightest
expectation that your CEO has studied and mastered leadership theory at the
depth that is expected for introductory level of practice in mathematics? No.
We accept the idea of their wisdom deriving “Straight from the gut” and that
such judgement is valued at thousands of times as much as their formally-
educated workers. Even in academia it seems, non-stem phds and professorships
are granted on the basis of emotion-level reasoning about political belief and
activism rather than candid rational inquiry.

~~~
visarga
Being a CEO is more about assuming risks, that's where authority comes from.
As a formally educated employee you get your check every month and if you're
not happy you can hop to another job easily, but a business runs the risk of
wasting its money on a grand scale.

~~~
jl2718
Risk is assumed by founders. I think that's different. Through years of
working at a bunch of 'big' places, the selection of leaderships seems more
and more arbitrary. The mechanical aspects of the CEO job are not dissimilar
from any other job in the company, and one would expect an expert to occupy
that position. I didn't intend to make that comment about pay, except that we
have collectively accepted a system where an ambiguous set of emotional
reactions are massively better-compensated than formal systems of knowledge
and analysis.

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btimar
Nice! I've been meaning to check out "Linear algebra done right" for a while

~~~
nextos
Sadly this is the latest (3rd) edition. IMHO they ruined the beautiful
typesetting typical of Springer math books with tons of super distracting
boxes.

I guess the book is a victim of its own popularity, as other books such as
Abbott still keep their old look.

My 2 favorite linear algebra books now have broken typesetting. Halmos is too
antique, and would benefit greatly from modern LaTeX. Axler is now too flashy.

~~~
sgdpk
I agree with this! I prefer reading Axler's 2nd edition because it is a lot
less distracting.

~~~
salutis
I did not know that the 2nd edition of the book is typeset in a simple black
and white style. Thank you for sharing!

------
Tomte
Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual and Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right stood
out for me when skimming the list.

Both are regularly recommended in HN book threads.

------
p0llard
The texts _Philosophical and Mathematical Logic_ and _Mathematical Logic_
should probably fall under _Mathematics and Statistics_ rather than _Religion
and Philosophy_ , but seems a nice resource otherwise!

~~~
hnarayanan
OP here. Thank you for pointing this out.

I didn’t manually categorise it, just extracted the Springer categories. Will
manually review this tomorrow.

~~~
p0llard
Huh interesting, I'd guess they're basing that on the series the book is
published in, which can often be misleading.

~~~
ckcheng
"Philosophical and Mathematical Logic" is by Harrie de Swart affiliated with
the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Department of
Philosophy, Tilburg University.

> Throughout the text, the author provides some impressions of the historical
> development of logic: Stoic and Aristotelian logic, logic in the Middle Ages
> and Frege's Begriffsschrift, together with the works of George Boole
> (1815-1864) and August De Morgan (1806-1871), the origin of modern logic.

Those topics feel pretty typical of logic as studied in philosophy depts. I
think traditionally, a lot of logicians working with formal or mathematical
logic worked out of philosophy departments. I've been told that more recently,
a lot of them now work out of Comp Sci departments. There just isn't enough of
them in one place to have a Dept of Logic I guess! :)

"Mathematical Logic" by Roman Kossak is probably mis-categorized. Topics look
like typical math topics. Affiliation is Math Dept at CUNY, Bronx Community
College campus. Yeah, probably should be under math section.

~~~
p0llard
Mathematical Logic and Philosophy cross over quite a bit, but I think any text
which features proof sketches of Löwenheim–Skolem (present in _Philosophical
and Mathematical Logic_ ) qualifies as a mathematics text. At any rate the
category _Religion and Philosophy_ is wrong, _Analytic Philosophy_ maybe.

~~~
ckcheng
Totally agree that formal and mathematical logic crosses over lots between
math and philosophy folks (well, analytic philosophers and logicians).
Categorizing books is pretty subjective. Looking at the table of contents, it
feels like a work from someone working in the philosophy dept. There's an
entire chapter for each of Modal Logic, Philosophy of Language, Intuitionism
and Intuitionistic Logic, and Fallacies and Unfair Discussion Methods --- when
I learned those things, I learned them from philosophy department courses.
Certainly it was a very analytic philosophy department, so I'm totally on
board with putting it under an analytic philosophy section. I seem to notice
publishers and bookstores like to group religion and philosophy together
though, so maybe that's why Springer did that. And yeah, I agree that it'd be
a better fit for an analytic philosophy section.

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mesaframe
There are so many and only so much time to read. It takes a lot of time to
finish any book properly. And I have already much books in my backlog.

~~~
Zeebrommer
Same here. With so much high-quality information and entertainment available
the choice of what to invest time in becomes harder and harder, eventually
consuming a significant portion of that limited time budget to begin with.

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vexx5702
Here's a script to automatically download the entire set:
[https://github.com/tempname1024/springer-
dl](https://github.com/tempname1024/springer-dl)

~~~
tzs
Edit: I reported the issue below, and the author has fixed it.

Note: that will fail on Unix/Linux to get one book, "Systems Programming in
Unix/Linux" [1].

The script wants to put the book in a directory named with the book's title,
and wants to include the title in the name of the PDF and/or EPUB files. The
title includes a "/", which is the directory separator on Unix/Linux, so this
does not work out well.

You'll end up with a "Systems Programming in Unix" directory, containing a
"Linux" subdirectory, and no PDF or EPUB files.

As far as I can tell, it gets everything else fine.

If you only want PDF files, make this change before running it:

    
    
      42c42
      <         links = [x for x in p.links if 'content/pdf' in x or 'download/epub' in x]
      ---
      >         links = [x for x in p.links if 'content/pdf' in x]
    

A PDF only download of everything is 4.5 GB. There are 383 books.

[1]
[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-92429-8](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-92429-8)

------
codezero
Not sure if it's still up to date, but I appreciated the Quantum Physics text
by R. Shankar when I was studying physics as a supplement to the courses I was
taking for 4th/5th year physics.

~~~
joshvm
Shankar is a great textbook. Up to date in the sense that the core material
hasn't changed a huge amount in the last 50 years. I didn't see it recommended
in many reading list at university, but I found it... somehow? It takes a
totally different approach to teaching QM by introducing vector spaces up
front and sneaking in the notation for bra/kets, commutation and other
goodies. Before you know if you're happy with things like <A|B> and it comes
as much less of a surprise later on when used in a QM sense. The book also
introduces Hamiltonian mechanics so that by the time you get to the QM
postulates, you get them in a much more rigorous form than the sort of hand-
waving you'd get in other introductory textbooks.

I think unfortunately it does end up as a supplement as actually working
through the first few chapters would take some time. However I think for
getting a handle on the mathematics underneath QM, it's great. It covers a lot
of stuff that's either optional or not covered on most undergraduate physics
courses.

------
Eugeleo
Any recommendations (in whatever area), apart from Elements of Statistical
Learning and Linear Algebra Done Right? And are their Probability and All of
Statistics books any good?

~~~
harry8
Can vouch for, Wasserman. Is good, imho.

Also lectures on YouTube and course info @ cmu.

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non-entity
There some pretty interesting, weirdly specific subjects in there:

[https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-57883-5](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-57883-5)

Also some cool stuff related to some projects I'm working on. Unfortunately I
find most textbooks involve a ton of mathematics and notation I'm not familiar
with.

------
davidivadavid
Now if only we had a good dependency graph for these...

~~~
ashton314
Lol.

I've been reading _Types and Programming Languages_ by Benjamin Pierce. It's a
fantastic book and I plan on eventually going through the whole thing. For
now, I've been skipping around a bit to get to the stuff I'm interested in
first. Pierce has included a lovely dependency graph between all of the
chapters so you know what to read and in what order. It's super nice.

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g-b-r
I can't figure out the copyright aspect of this; yes, it's probably fine for
everyone to download them while they're available, but will you be
_theoretically_ allowed to keep them after they end the promotion?

I'd say yes, but maybe that's not what they meant... or maybe it's such a
small revenue loss that they don't care

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gowld
These are download copies, not streaming. What happens vis a via copyright
after Springer stops offering these downloads?

~~~
hnarayanan
What are you saying??

~~~
g-b-r
That we don't know if it will be legal to keep the files after they stop
offering them (as it seems will happen).

Of course it's unlikely that some cop will come and verify that you deleted
them, but someone prefers to stay legal/honest

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ksr
This search on Springer also yields good results
[https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-
type=%...](https://link.springer.com/search/page/3?facet-content-
type=%22Book%22&showAll=false)

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neves
When I first saw the books, they presented the number of citations. It was
great to infer the book quality. I don't find this info anymore.

~~~
thundermuffin
Citations, mentions, and downloads are all on the actual Springer site and not
the GitHub link it appears.

~~~
neves
I didn't see it. Maybe it is the mobile version.

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entha_saava
Off topic, but last time I posted a link to upenn's online books page, it went
unnoticed. Great resource IMO.

------
user982
After some sed and wget, the total comes to 11GB.

~~~
yumraj
Could you share your scripts, for those or us with lesser scripting skills

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Someone released this a bit ago:
[https://github.com/alexgand/springer_free_books](https://github.com/alexgand/springer_free_books)

~~~
inakarmacoma
Perhaps we could all seed your torrent?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I don't torrent, and it's silly to violate copyright on something they're
literally offering for free...

Bear in mind that while they're letting you download it for free, Springer
doesn't permit redistribution.

