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Here is an excellent collection of 45 free books in PDF format which I found here — "Programming Notes for Professionals" books.
The PDFs contain this on one of their very first pages:
Please feel free to share this PDF with anyone for free
This ${insert title here} Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack
Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack
Overflow. Text content is released under Creative Commons BY-SA, see credits at
the end of this book whom contributed to the various chapters. Images may be
copyright of their respective owners unless otherwise specified.
Because of the range of software development related topics covered, I thought this might be of interest to a large fraction of people on SN.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday January 21 2018, @03:40PM (13 children)
Thanks for those links. I went to the hacker news story and found the link to the zip file containing all the books and downloaded it. What a valuable resource. I've flicked through the the C programming one, the Algorithms one and the bash one (since they're my main interests). I wish something like this had been available 20 years ago.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @03:57PM (3 children)
Just notice their disclaimer on content correctness. I browsed quickly through the Linux one and found a few errors there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Sunday January 21 2018, @04:10PM (1 child)
Critical thinking skills should always be applied, and experiment to confirm what you think you've learned. This stuff is free, new, and it has bound to have some errors. Community feedback will fix this (as it does with code).
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday January 22 2018, @10:33PM
If it's Stack Overflow, nothing stops you from commenting on it to update something, or correct it. I've seen many authors of both questions and answers edit their own content for correctness. Community Participation does indeed fix this.
I agree, a lot of people poo-poo Stack Overflow and deride copy-paste coding, but forget that 85% of the answer was correct. Minor syntax errors, or missing flags, are something you should find out on your own when testing the code. I've not found many copy-paste snippets of code that were good to go as is, but I've found the direction to the answer an at least, and often a good amount of help to implement the answer.
What I really appreciate are the answers that have questions with the reference material quoted, and then explained. Some contributors really need to be thanked for that, so I'm not surprised you could make a book of notes from the good content.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @04:57PM
Yep. That's the main problem with Stack Overflow. I do sometimes consult SO for solutions to notty computer programming problems. Many times there is at least one person who has a good answer to my problem, but there are several that are talking out of their asses. It's a game of sifting to separate the wheat from the chaff. Remember, you get what you pay for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @04:04PM (6 children)
Sometimes they are a bit dry, but all the information is there, and has been since more than 20 years ago.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday January 21 2018, @04:08PM (4 children)
20 years ago I didn't have any money so I couldn't afford the books. Now I can, I've amassed a collection. This will be helpful to young enthusiastic people who are self motivated but might not have the money to spend on a big pile of books, Yes, the man pages are there, and yes there are blogs here and there but sometimes it's nice to be able to read through a book to find out what you don't know that you don't know.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @05:00PM (3 children)
Today, the C standard, and the C++ standard, are pretty much available for free as PDFs or even LaTeX source for the adventurous.
POSIX publishes its info, including its definition of the Shell Language.
The GNU bash manual has always been around and is quite extensive.
There are only a few concepts in algorithms that most programmers ever need; if you understand linked lists and hashtables, then you're pretty much set.
It's all there, my friend, and it always has been.
Indeed, with FOSS, once you learn some these languages, you can literally read what you need to learn from all of the code in the world.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Sunday January 21 2018, @05:08PM (1 child)
Yes, and if you have someone to introduce you to those concepts, you'll be fine. If you don't, and you don't know that you don't know you need a reference book, and preferably a tutorial in addition to the manual.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:34PM
The kind who brings knowledge to himself, and the kind to which knowledge must be brought.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @01:40PM
The C++ standard is great to determine how a given construct should behave. It is not that useful if you want to find out which construct you should use to achieve a certain result. That's because it is not written to be a tutorial or even a reference manual, but to be a specification.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:44PM
This is answered further down...
(Score: 4, Informative) by tibman on Sunday January 21 2018, @04:30PM
Did the same as you. Here's the link for anyone interested: books.goalkicker.com/all.zip
The two books i paged through were really good. Written more like a reference book than a "learn programming" book. Which is fantastic, imo.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Sunday January 21 2018, @06:05PM
http://books.goalkicker.com/all.zip [goalkicker.com]
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P