Free Programing Books
23 comments
·October 18, 2025piskov
dunham
do pdfs count?
% mdfind -onlyin ~ kind:pdf |wc -l
11116
mindcrime
They totally do! And epub, mobi, djvu...
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.pdf" | wc -l
18952
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.epub" | wc -l
2385
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.djvu" | wc -l
1384
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.mobi" | wc -l
125
NoMoreNicksLeft
Why are you downloading mobi files? Seriously, I only do that if there is no epub, and only keep it long enough to convert it.
dotancohen
Is mdfind a Windows executable? Is there a standalone version that I might be able to use on the rare occasions I need to fight with somebody's Windows box?
Jtsummers
mdfind is a built-in with macOS. It's similar to find (should be on your *nix system if you have one) which can be installed with Cygwin on Windows. On Windows, you'd use Powershell and Get-ChildItem (I don't think it's case sensitive, but I don't use PS much).
blackhaj7
Nice!
Taleb calls it the anti-library
yulker
Spiritually different intention, but both yield lots of unread material at hand. The parent's is "bought with best intentions" but letting it pile up despite that intention, Taleb's is purposefully accumulating material that you don't intend to read unless a future you finds it helpful to explore that book
f1shy
This is what I do. When I see a free PDF that seems well written, or was suggested to me, I save it in the bucket “maybe someday I might need that” but l know I will 99% never read. My experience is that it is useful. At least 10 books that were deep in that bucket were useful for me, and ended reading them. I must have 10000 though.
treetalker
Research tool!
pessimizer
I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in, like your bookshelf or ebook directory. The only caveat when it comes to paper is not to buy shit e.g. bestsellers, or software books that you're not going to read and use right away. If you don't buy shit (this is also true with board games and guitars), you can resell likely for about what you paid (or sometimes unexpectedly far more), whenever you want.
Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
dotancohen
> I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in
pessimizer
Pretty well-established that targeted advertising works better than untargeted advertising, all other things being equal.
I think you should put things in your bookshelf or collection of pdfs to hold off FOMO. When you finally get back around to being interested in Bosnian history, the books you wanted might be impossible to get. If you never get back around to it, you can help some stranger out who did.
I guess this is becoming less true with the libgens and annas-archives of the world, but when those all disappear on the same day (that seemed like any other), you'll have missed out. I certainly don't miss the days when I spent years waiting for a book to come up on ebay or used.addall.com at a price under $150.
InMice
Good list. Would be nice to add more metadata like publication year
Qem
The Pharo site has a section with several free books on the language: https://books.pharo.org/
AfterHIA
A few more that young developers need to read:
Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush
https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr...
Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them."
https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...
Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing."
https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask
Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics."
https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...
Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe...
Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11
Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?
null
globular-toast
So many people I know download PDFs and never, ever read them. I truly believe reading is one of the best things you can do. If you find you're not reading then the PDFs aren't working for you. Try getting hard copies of some books you think you should read. Personally I can never read text books on screens, but I devour them in paper format.
geoffbp
Programming*
mystraline
If you head to libgen.ac, you can find nearly every book.
Sure, its a 'pirate library'. But seriously, if public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would be banned as well.
And that's also not saying anything about the AI companies, both targeting everything they can get their mitts on.
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later.