
Microsoft eBook Giveaway - dabber
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mssmallbiz/2017/07/11/largest-free-microsoft-ebook-giveaway-im-giving-away-millions-of-free-microsoft-ebooks-again-including-windows-10-office-365-office-2016-power-bi-azure-windows-8-1-office-2013-sharepo/
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virtuabhi
I downloaded a couple of SQL, data science books. These "books" are white
papers or program tutorials. Also the writing style of blog post (with so many
FREE in red font) does not inspire any confidence in the quality of these
"books".

~~~
mastazi
> Also the writing style of blog post (with so many FREE in red font)

I think it was intentional, the way I see it the author was just mocking those
"free ebook" marketing pages which are as terrible as common...

~~~
gruez
You're giving the author too much credit, considering how most of the "ebooks"
have less content than a blog post, and that his title is "Director - Sales
Excellence".

~~~
mastazi
You're giving your intuition too much credit, by judging someone's writing
based on one single post when the rest of his blog is just one click away :-p

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gruez
>BizTalk Server 2016 Licensing Datasheet

>Excel 2013 Keyboard Shortcuts

>Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 Pricing and Licensing FAQs

>Office 365 Licensing Brief

"""ebooks"""

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AlphaWeaver
Here's a pastebin [0] with all the PDF urls concatenated if you want to
download them all.

[0]: [https://pastebin.com/H3KsMHW6](https://pastebin.com/H3KsMHW6)

~~~
dabber
And Powershell script here:

[https://pastebin.com/S81DGVg9](https://pastebin.com/S81DGVg9)

[Edit]

In total everything comes in around 3.4GiB. I found this in /r/homelabs and
they've got all the files up on their US and EU FTP servers. Details here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/wiki/resources/ftp](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/wiki/resources/ftp)

~~~
flukus
Is that the same powershell script linked from the page (I can't access
pastebin)? I'm getting the error "unexpected token 'in $books'". If I remove
the for loop I get the error "The term 'Invoke-WebRequest $book -Method Head '
is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet.

~~~
dabber
No it's different. It's from the top comment in the reddit post[0]. Seems like
others in that thread have had the same issue with the one from the article.
The issue seems to be the script doesn't create the directory for you[1] so
you need to make it first.

However, I'm more of a Bash guy so please take my words/links with a grain of
salt.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/6mtqdq/a_tonne_of_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/6mtqdq/a_tonne_of_free_microsoft_ebooks_approx_300/)

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/6mtqdq/a_tonne_of_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/6mtqdq/a_tonne_of_free_microsoft_ebooks_approx_300/dk57a5t/)

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yawgmoth
I highly recommend .NET Microservices: Architecture for Containerized .NET
Applications. It's pretty good if you're interested in Microservices at all,
the containerization bits are icing.

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fencepost
If people are being the PDFs and find margins that make viewing difficult, I
highly recommend the "briss" PDF trimming tool. Scripting it doesn't really
work that well, but if you run the .jar, then open 1 file (possibly telling it
to skip 1 page /the cover), then pick Actions, Convert it's reasonably quick
and gives a nicely trimmed PDF suitable for reading on plenty of screens.

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tonteldoos
This is awesome!

For those that want to grab all from the commandline in linux, get either the
text file on the site (and remove the first line), or one of the lists posted
here, with the following command (will correctly name the files):

$ cat <list_file_name> | xargs wget --content-disposition

~~~
codefined
My favourite is

$ cat <list_file_name> | parallel -j20 --gnu "wget {}"

Downloaded them in a few seconds!

~~~
tonteldoos
Nice! Right now I'm stuck on an older single core machine with limited
bandwidth anyway :(

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flukus
The developer section seems to be padded with outdated junk:

* Moving to Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010

* Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

* Programming Windows® Phone 7 (Special Excerpt 2)

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TwoNineA
Do you think it's a bit extreme when you need to write books to explain
product licensing?

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amingilani
Any recommendations for a developer that doesn't use any MS tools? :)

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partycoder
As interesting as a free AOL installation disk giveaway

~~~
arde
Once upon a time that meant a free diskette ready to format. Still not super
useful at the time, yeah.

