
A lot of free ebooks - ghosthamlet
http://hackershelf.com/browse/
======
okal
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. Some things I need to clarify:

1\. The site was never meant to be purely for programming books. It says "free
books for the intellectually curious" for a reason :) 2\. Non free books are
not allowed. That's where the flagging feature comes in. All those were added
today, with the best of intentions, I'm sure - and I'm truly grateful to
whoever did - but they have to go. Sorry people.

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fbomb
Most of these books are neither free nor have anything to do with programming.

~~~
okal
I didn't submit the link (I'm the developer), so it may not be obvious, but
the site was never at any point meant to be purely for tech books. As for the
non-free stuff, all of that was added today while I was at work. I'm already
culling those submissions. Thanks.

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cathustler
Yo, developer guy, it would be nice if there was some curation involved; some,
if not most, of these books are not free. Perhaps allow the community to also
remove books that don't fit the guidelines or report them for just not being
free? Otherwise, this is going in my bat-belt. Totally awesome idea.

~~~
Splendor
There's already a "Flag book for abuse" link for each item.

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ajessu
Don't mean to hijack the thread, but there is another great resource for this
(in spanish, though) with a very high amount of ebooks:

Open libra:
[http://www.etnassoft.com/biblioteca/?search_term=&books_...](http://www.etnassoft.com/biblioteca/?search_term=&books_category=libros_programacion&books_criteria=post_date_DESC&lang=english&since=all)
(I took the liberty to pre-filter the link with "programming books in
english", since there are a lot of them in spanish on this site)

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mikecaron
Why the hell is "The God Delusion" in the mix? That is not a programming book,
it's a social commentary about religion.

~~~
mathattack
One could argue that it ties to Artificial Intelligence, and how ideas get
into our heads. But yes, I had the same reaction.

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wfunction
The gem inside that list:

[http://hackershelf.com/book/289/a-mathematical-theory-of-
com...](http://hackershelf.com/book/289/a-mathematical-theory-of-
communication/)

~~~
anonfunction
For me it was [http://hackershelf.com/book/350/ai-algorithms-data-
structure...](http://hackershelf.com/book/350/ai-algorithms-data-structures-
and-idioms-in-prolog-lisp-and-java/)

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kossmoboleat
A lot of these aren't actually free. It doesn't say that on the website
either, but it would be nice if you could filter by free books.

~~~
falsedan
Submission guidelines say, 'only link to free (as in beer) books'. No one is
reading the submission guidelines...

~~~
roryokane
Right. Nothing on the main page or Submit page mentions free books; the
guidelines are hidden in the “about” link in the footer
(<http://hackershelf.com/about.html>). Because of that, I’ve seen a certain
poor misguided user submit 30 non-free books, complete with cover art, that
are going to have to be deleted eventually. All we can do for now is flag non-
free books until the site owner deletes them or creates a separate section of
the site for them.

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gtani
Missed some haskell books, if that's your site

[http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1af3iw/9_best_free_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1af3iw/9_best_free_haskell_books/)

[http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20130316105209238/BestFree...](http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20130316105209238/BestFreeHaskellBooks.html)

and scala staircase 1st ed <http://www.artima.com/pins1ed/>

~~~
okal
Hey. I'm the developer behind the site. You could submit those if you'd like.
That's where the "community" bit comes in :)

~~~
akavel
Feat suggestion: would be nice if you allowed for a TOC to be attached to book
description, to ease a quick glance over the contents. Occurred to me when
browsing <http://hackershelf.com/book/344/speeding-through-haskell/> \- as the
target link has no TOC, if someone took care to provide a TOC on the Shelf,
I'd know better what to expect.

After more browsing, the topics list at <http://hackershelf.com/topics/> looks
like it could take some more care: probably case insenitiveness, maybe fix the
strange duplication of letter topics (or does it have some hidden purpose?),
maybe put a list of quicklinks to letter-sections on top.

Just some feedback from a random Internet guy ;) the site does a very good
first impression!

~~~
okal
Thanks :) The TOC sounds like a great idea, obvious in hindsight. The case
sensitivity of the topics is just a reflection of my laziness, I should have
taken care of that a long time ago. Hope you keep finding the site useful.

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ichinaski
This one is brilliant: Mathematics for Computer Science.

[http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr10/cos433/mat...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr10/cos433/mathcs.pdf)

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hsmyers
It is getting to the point where the only advantages to 'real' books left are:
1. they can be autographed (thank you Mr. Knuth and Mr. Brodie) and 2. they
make really good insulation during winters...

~~~
nsmartt
E-books are still an inferior technology to physical books in some ways. I
can't, for example, draw a diagram in the margins of an E-book. I can write
notes and highlight, but it basically stops there.

With Amazon (not sure about other providers), there's a risk of remote wipe.
E-books are often not really yours, and DRM makes that doubly true. The risk
of loss with e-books is significantly higher than with physical books.

~~~
EwanToo
I'm not sure you can quantify the risk of loss with e-books being
significantly higher than with physical books.

There are a lot of house fires, any one of them could destroy your book
collection (even the smoke damage alone can make then unusable) - same with
floods, vandalism, etc.

How many people have lost their e-book collection due to remote wipe? And if
you're going to talk about the person who was wiped by Amazon, it's worth
checking the conclusion of that story...

~~~
nsmartt
I was thinking more along the lines of accidental data loss than everyone
having to worry about remote wipes all the time. I should've made that more
clear.

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pramodliv1
Thanks! I didn't see that there were more pages at first (Page 1 out of 16).
It could be highlighter better.

~~~
okal
Haven't had much time to work on it since last year. I'll look into this over
the weekend. Thanks.

~~~
greenyoda
Thanks for assembling this wonderful collection! One more suggestion, though:
Since many of the books don't have cover images, you actually have to mouse
over the ":-(" images on the "shelf" page to locate a particular title. It
would be nice to also have a simple textual list of all the titles on your
shelf, sorted in alphabetical order.

Another useful feature might be an RSS feed that gets updated when a book is
added.

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eaurouge
I counted close to ten free books by Allen B. Downey
[<http://allendowney.com>].

~~~
sshrin
He publishes all of his books at: <http://greenteapress.com/>

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bdreadz
+1 for seeing the word free so far and every book I've gone to click on is not
free. Very frustrating.

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McUsr
Thanks for sharing this, Now this was a great link!

I want to recommend Eric S. Raymonds books for those that haven't read them.

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RyanMcGreal
+1 for Simon Singh's _The Code Book_ as an engaging read, but it's by no means
a programming book.

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blaireaug
Cool! I like this a lot.

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nabaraj
DOM Enlightenment sounds like a treasure. Cheers

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puzanop
Spam please delete this link, misleading the books are not free

~~~
fuzzix
Annoying, as the entries are user submitted.

The site should be more upfront about its intent.

There are still many free (beer) texts on there.

