I'm trying to amass a list of programming books with opensource licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL, etc. The books can be about a particular programming language or about computers in general.
What are some freely available programming books on the internet?
Here is a PDF of the book On Lisp by Paul Graham that I've been reading lately.
That is an amazing resource, not all of the links work, but about 95% which is still awesome
MIT has their open course ware for computer science.
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm
You can check out my free ebook, Foundations of Programming. (Karl Seguin)
As long as we're on the subject of Lisp, Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel is available for free online.
Bruce Eckel has free books on several topics here.
Dive Into Python is a nice free Python book. Check out Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++ as well.
If you haven't read it yet, I recommend the free PDF download Think Python. It is a great book.
This may sound silly, but have you tried your local library? I work in a college library and we have access to a lot of ebooks through the Safari service (O'Reilly, Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, Microsoft Press, Sams and Que just to name a few). Many college libraries especially community colleges allow members of the community to become patrons, whether or not they allow off-campus access to online resources for these patrons varies school to school.
For those interested in reading about Smalltalk:
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
has an extensive collection of out-of-print smalltalk books available as PDF files.
Here what's on my bookmarks:
All of these are available online (free and legal).
The Foundations of Programming E-Book from CodeBetter.com is a worthwhile read for beginners.
It's not an ebook, but every programmer should probably watch it.
MIT's - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Video Lectures
http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/
Also, Berkley have their lectures posted online
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php
Maybe you can try searching bookmarking services like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com with keywords like "free" and "ebook" (books, ebook, book, etc.)?
If you don't feel like reading take a look at http://www.bestechvideos.com/. You can find a large collection of tech video on a large number of subjects.
Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community by Richard P. Gabriel.
Not so much a programming book as a series of essays on various topics, but definitely worth a read. Richard made it available for free on-line after it went out of print.
I got some great computer science related books, papers, etc. here.
My links for C#:
Javascript & jQuery:
Algorithms:
Free books on various topics from O'Reilly:
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation if you want something more advanced.
Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, several books on different Open Source projects.
It's not a proper book, but one of Wikipedia's spinoffs is Wikibooks, which has quite a lot of books in different stages of development.
Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
Programming from the Ground Up
This is an introductory book to programming and computer science using assembly language. It assumes the reader has never programmed before, and introduces the concepts of variables, functions, and flow control. The reason for using assembly language is to get the reader thinking in terms of how the computer actually works underneath. Knowing how the computer works from a "bare-metal" standpoint is often the difference between top-level programmers and programmers who can never quite master their art.
Some great links for download open source books:
http://www.onlinecomputerbooks.com/free-open-source-books.php
http://www.freebookcentre.net/SpecialCat/Free-Open-Source-Books-Download.html
Greetings from Spain.
This is not a Creative Commons nor Open Source book, but the author has decided to give the content away for free online for everyone to read without charge, so I think it is worth mentioning.
Besides that, it is the best book on Lisp for beginners I have read, and is very up to date also (published July 2008).
Strongly recommended for anyone interested in learning Lisp:
Book: Structure and Interpretation of computer programs (Table of contents)
Lectures are here, smaller re-encoded versions from MIT OpenCourseWare are here.
My links for C#:
Javascript & jQuery:
Algorithms:
Free books on various topics from O'Reilly:
Python Bibliotheca Includes books like 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist'.
What about Wikibooks? I've noticed quite a few programming-related books on there.
Essential Skills for Agile Development (alternate link).
License: We are making the online version of the book for free for you to download. This version is licensed for your personal viewing only. You are also allowed to redistribute it as long as this license is retained. It is NOT licensed for printing or for commercial use. If you’d like to print it, please order the hard copy from us at www.agileskills.org.
There is one ultimate source of free programming books...google!
Try the following query
intitle:index.of + "pdf" + "name" -htm -html
This is useful when you know the name of the book.
Warning: You might get books that are not "free". Download at your own risk.
Most of the content of O'Reilly's PHP in a Nutshell by Paul Hudson is available in Wiki format from The Practical PHP Programming site.
"Programming Ruby - The pragmatic programmers guide"
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/
It's quite good, I used it to learn ruby. However when it comes to reading/learning, quality comes first IMHO and books like "The Art Of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth" are not free.
I can also recommend the Algorithm book by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani, which is mentioned above.
Scrum and XP from the trenches.
Registration and login is required to download this book.
the mason book: Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason
and the bazaar and cathedral book:
User Interface Design for Programmers by joel
Some Linux related books:
Java Application Development on Linux by Carl Albing and Michael Schwarz(PDF)
The Art of Unix Programming (valid link, but dupe of #1)
Credits: dailyartisan.com
"the topic of programming' and the range of eBooks about various aspects of 'programming' is pretty darn vast .. i just downloaded a book on how to program Ogre3D .. does this qualify? .. Maybe you could isolate your interests?
and i've found almost everything i need via the bittorrents (torrentz.com and the like)
AddedBytes.com has a pretty useful collection of Cheat Sheets:
I haven't updated the list in a while... but here is the comp sci section of a hobby site I maintain:
Not a book, but you might want to check out Donald Knuth's Computer Musings, a series of lectures that he gives at Stanford. His web site can be found here.
At the risk of being downvoted, all books are free at the library, and you can find any of the books listed on other threads where people have already asked this question. I know you can't keep them, but if they're really great, you can buy a copy then, and save yourself the cost of buying the books that you'll only read once anyway.
Though they'll likely not carry the latest programming books, there are plenty of books that will lay the foundation for being a great programmer, like "The Mythical Man Month", among others.
One online resource I use frequently is the POSIX standard - not quite a book, but still very useful. If I remember rightly, you are supposed to register the first time, but there's no cost involved.
Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists.
Actually, a practical guide for a programmer looking to get into DSP in general. It's a fun read if you're already interested in the field, and completely free to download!
This is a great read. Quick and choc full of great ideas.
Foundations of Programming by Karl Seguin of CodeBetter.com
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is one of the "classic" computer science texts, and is free at MIT's web site.
Security Engineering, Ross Anderson. While not about programming directly, there are a lot of concepts that can be useful when trying to design a secure distributed (or non-distributed) system. I used this book (hard copy) as a text for one of my university courses and found that it was quite interesting to read. I would often read sections that weren't even part of the course, simply because they were so interesting.
Charles Petzold's .Net Book 0 is available on his website for free.
Practical Common Lisp is a very good book for Lisp beginnners.
On Lisp covers advanced Lisp techniques.
How about Programming Ruby. I use it all the time. It's a good start if you want to play around with a new language and a great resource if you are already doing Ruby programming.
Not quite free books, but O'Reilly and other publishers usually offer one free chapter of each book. This could be a good way to tell if you'd like to buy a copy.
This was one of the books in the list that mmyers posted, but I wanted to bring more attention to The Cathedral and the Bazaar. To me, it (and the other essays included in the book) serve as a good intro to the world of open source software.
Entity Framework learning guide - free, 514 pages
I also recommend pdf files search: Pdfgeni
If you are looking for academic stuff it's always worth to search at MIT OCW
Foundations of Programming Ebook by Karl Seguin
http://codebetter.com/files/folders/codebetter_downloads/entry179694.aspx
ProgrammingGroundUp - nice programming introduction in assembler
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is a good choice if you want to learn Ruby and laugh at the same time.
Extreme Perl, it's basically extreme programming with perl. So if you're just into learning the basic of extreme programming principles you can use this as well.
I use it mainly for the part on TDD :P
List of Free Programming books (compiled):
Meta-List
Graphics Programming
Language Agnostic:
ASP.NET MVC:
Assembly Language:
Bash
C/C++
C#
Django
Forth
Git
Haskell
HTML
Java
JavaScript
Linux
Lisp
Lua
Maven
Mercurial
.NET (C#)
NoSQL
Objective-C
Oracle Server
Oracle PL/SQL
Parrot / Perl 6
Perl
PHP
PowerShell
Prolog
PostgreSQL
Python
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Subversion
SQL (Implementation agnostic)
Vim
I'm not sure if it qualifies as a book, but WikiBooks has plenty of material on programming.
NVidia has some free literature on graphics programming:
How to Design Programs An Introduction to Computing and Programming
It uses scheme as SCIP, but it takes a lighter aproach.
Lots of books are free with a paid safari subscription. http://safari.oreilly.com/
Free hard copy of Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review from Smart Bear.
I found this book on C, however I'm as yet undecided as to whether or not it is "good":
The C Book, second edition by Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran
Heres a list of some off CodePlex: http://blogs.msdn.com/wriju/archive/2009/01/07/free-ebooks-at-codeplex.aspx
Mercurial (Distributed Version Control Software):
Mercurial (Hg) book by Bryan O'Sullivan.
The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language. Not open source licence, but freely available.
Check out GNY
Has free e-books for:
Here's a list of the free e-books referred to in Code Complete with their descriptions from the book. StackOverflow votes Code Complete as the single most influential book every programmer should read, so this is a good recommendation for these books, right?
Raymond, Eric. The Art of Unix Programming. This is a well-researched look at software design through Unix-colored glasses. Section 1.6 is an especially concise 12-page explanation of 17 key Unix design principles. HTML
Abran, Alain, et al. Swebok: Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2001. This contains a detailed description of the "body of software knowledge" compiled by IEEE - it's an overview of software engineering. PDF.
SPMN. Little Book of Configuration Management. Software Program Managers Network, 1998. This pamphlet is an introduction to configuration management activities (version control, change control). Zipped PDF available here.
NASA Software Engineering Laboratory. Software Measurement Guidebook, 1995. This guidebook of about 100 pages is probably the best source of practical information on how to setup and run a measurement program to improve software processes. Download a PDF using menu option on this page.
NASA Manager's Handbook for Software Development. PDF.
I haven't used it yet, but Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is great. It'll definitely be first on my list when I learn Ruby.
THANKS! This has been a very valuable resource considering the economic situation we're all faced with these days. Savings, of any amount, is wonderfully welcomed!
The C++ Annotations by Frank B. Brokken (GPL-licensed).
According to the website:
The Annotations are intended for people with a good knowledge of C who want to make the transition to C++.
Temple Of Quantum Computing: http://www.toqc.com/
The link to the book is here.
How to Design Programs - Learn the skill of designing programs using a Scheme-like language.
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation - A textbook on programming language theory.
E-Books for free online viewing and/or download @ Free Programming Books
The books cover all major programming languages: Ada, Assembly, Basic, C, C#, C++, CGI, JavaScript, Perl, Delphi, Pascal, Haskell, Java, Lisp, PHP, Prolog, Python, Ruby, as well as some other languages, game programming, and software engineering.
Here is one on Applying Design Patterns
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16352479/Software-Design-Patterns-Made-Simple
Introducing software design patterns to you in a simple, human readable, and funny (?) way - in the context of designing a soccer engine - By discussing the thought process behind applying design patterns
The Wikibooks Computer Science department has quite a few useful editable, commmunity-written books.
A bunch of free books can be found on Galileo Computing - <openbook> (Only in German)
I would like to add the following free online books for the Forth programming language.
First the classics:
Leo Brodie's Starting FORTH — online edition
Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth. PDF version - is not a direct link to the PDF; needs to go through the pesky SourceForge download process.
Others:
Stephen Pelc's Programming Forth (PDF).
Stack Computers: the new wave. By Philip J. Koopman. For offline reading. Includes a study of Forth instruction frequencies.
Tim Hendtlass's Real Time Forth (PDF).
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good, Creative Commons-licensed.
Foundations of Programming eBook by Karl Seguin was a pretty good read. That link also includes a sample application he references in the book. Good stuff about a lot of essential programming concepts.
Very good resource - [dead link/exploit page]
Topics
Languages C C++ XML/XSL UML Perl Python Tcl/Tk Ada Lisp Assembly Fortran Prolog Ruby Cobol Basic Scheme Misc Programming uages More ...
Java/J2EE Core Java Advanced Jakarta Struts Servlet/JSP Spring/Hibernate J2EE/EJB Enterprise Security Distributed Computing GUI Multimedia J2ME More ...
Unix/Linux Core Unix Core Linux FreeBSD Security Shell Programming Networking Unix/Linux Programming System Administration GUI/X Windows Text Editing More ...
Computer Science Data Structure/Algorithms How to Program Languages Compiler OS Numerical AI/Logic Prog Functional OOD/OOP Computation Misc Architecture More ...
Databases Systems SQL Oracle DB2 Sybase MySQL PostgreSQL Misc More ...
Web PHP Programming JavaScript, AJAX DHTML/CSS Site Design Publishing More ...
Networking General Networks TCP/IP Management Programming Internet More ...
Advanced Topics Software Engineering Security Version Control Game LDAP Certificates Signal Processing Bioinformatics Cryptography Reference TeX/LateX Statistics Graphics Hardware & PC Science Mainframe Open Source Information Math Human More ...
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - Seems to still be a work in progress, but it's great. Along a similar style to Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.
Frameworks: http://pylonsbook.com/
It's licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Functional programming (with OCAML) :
A list of free english, French, Dutch, Italian books can be found here
Free Online Version of Second Edition Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages by Marty Hall and Larry Brown http://pdf.coreservlets.com/
It even has a web console so you can test the code in the browser as you read along.
http://diveintopython3.org/ is, AFAIK, the first open source book that specifically covers Python 3 (other than the official Python documentation and tutorial, of course).
Matters Computational (formerly Algorithms for Programmers) is a book about high performance algorithms that includes formal as well as source descriptions. The included source is licensed under the GPL version 3.
Very good read about the history/development of WordPerfect by Pete Peterson: http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml (PDF file available inline introduction)
Edit: Sorry, looks like this thread is exclusively for programming. This book isn't a programming book, but should still interest the same audience. Recommended.
Adobe has a copy of Getting Started with Flex for free as part of their Learn Flex in a week initiative.
http://search-pdf-books.com/ is a free search engine for all kinds of PDFs.
This came to me in an email from RedGate software's .Net Simple-Talk reflector newsletter. There is no specific license and I guess it should qualify as a free ebook
O'Reilly, "C# 3.0 Poket Reference", by Joseph and Ben Albahari.
Also coming in top google search result for the book
I am not posting the direct link.
Ada The Big Online Book of Linux Ada Programming
Ada Distilled
Rationale for Ada 2005
Also www.computer-books.us/ada95_2.php and www.adaic.org/standards/05rat/html/Rat-TTL.html
This one is a must-have for any Perl web programmer:
For offline reading: Direct download URL (632 KB, ZIP file with the set of HTML documents.)
It explains everything that has to do with web automation, tokenizing, HTML processing, automated POSTing, GETing, etc. using the Perl module LWP.
Great question, BTW.
97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know available under a creative commons license via wiki or Amazon.
At developer.symbian.org we have several complete books, and more are coming!
This is a free online version of the book we use in my university's algorithms course.
This is a good 1000-word summary of JavaScript:
Both of these books are good, though.
Basics of Compiler Design is available as free ebook, or as a fairly cheap printed version.
This is a big list: the IBM Redbooks. Although many are about IBM technologies (like Mainframes, DB2, etc) there are also some about non-IBM technologies like TCP/IP, LDAP.
A nicely compiled list 100's of open books on computer science, electrical engineering and mathematics at www.freetechbooks.com
Feel like some real OOP? Here's a list of freely available Smalltalk books: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
Here's a free book entitled The Definitive Guide to Building Code Quality by Don Jones. You can check it out here. It shows you how to debug, test and prepare code. Let me know what you think. Found it quite helpful!
Programming Windows Phone 7 Series (DRAFT Preview) Preview version released by Microsoft.
You can find many free books, University Lectures and Presentations on jQuery at http://www.bookuter.com/category/api-and-framework-programming-books/jquery-programming-books
Visual Prolog 7.2 This book gives hand-on experience to program in a statically typed Prolog environment, certainly a good read with practical examples in the field of artificial intelligence.
Domain Driven Design Quickly - based on Eric Evans's book.
Registration and login is required to download this book.
C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4, First Edition
http://www.qtrac.eu/C++-GUI-Programming-with-Qt-4-1st-ed.zip
Found it on Nokia's Qt Documentation website "First Steps with Qt": http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/how-to-learn-qt.html. Looks like a pretty good book.
If you want to learn a whole lot more about the strongly-typed, functional view of the world, I highly recommend two of Prof. Bob Harper's free books.
The first, on programming in Standard ML:
And the second, a type-centric introduction to programming languages:
Here's a list of books that I haven't seen in the suggestions so far:
Common Lisp books:
Scheme books:
Programming languages (using Scheme):
Collection of Free Programming and Technology Related Books
This post contains the list of sites offering Programming, Information Technology and Computer books which are provided by Publishers and Authors legally and free.
Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw and get the latest version of book here.
The Scheme Programming Language, Edition 4 (tspl4).
Covers r6rs, and is implementation-agnostic for the most part. Great reference.
There are a lot of excellent rudimentary resources at the Stanford computer science website:
In addition following these links will get you most of the handouts for the Stanford CS courses.
cs106x Programming Abstractions
If you scout around enough on these sites you can find many many resources.
On top of this you can find full video lectures from UC Berkeley:
You can find a lot of really good books about software architecture and design at InfoQ bookshelf:
Foundations of Programming by Karl Seguin
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
jQuery Fundamentals by Rebecca Murphey. Licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license.
Don't forget Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming (SICP) for learning Scheme Lisp, which can be found at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html for free.
The Seaside web framework for Smalltalk!
http://book.seaside.st/book/table-of-contents?_s=Sts-Dqcpd1FzX9nM&_k=1BSti5te&_n&11
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ - An introduction to programming, using the Ruby language
RELAX NG by Eric van der Vlist http://books.xmlschemata.org/relaxng/
XForms Essentials by Micah Dubinko http://xformsinstitute.com/essentials/
Semantics with Applications: A Formal Introduction (covers both operational & denotational semantics)
The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages (by Simon Peyton-Jones, who went on to create GHC. Fascinating theoretical/principled approach)
How to Design Programs (introductory programming book intended as a modernized and somewhat more accessible, e.g. assumes less math/science/engineering background, alternative to 'Structure and Interpretation ...'. Like that book, uses Scheme and takes a functional/compositional approach.)
Freely available, but not open source: The Practice of Parallel Programming by SERGEY A. BABKIN.
Introduction to Information Retrieval is great book and full content (PDF format as well as HTML per chapter) is located here
The NerdDinner tutorial is a great way to start with ASP.NET MVC.
I haven't seen "Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!" mentioned yet.
jQuery Fundamentals, by Rebecca Murphey
http://www.rebeccamurphey.com/jqfundamentals/
I am not sure where the boundary lies between website and book, but this one was an unpublished paper book before it went online, and is formatted for nice printing.
Cote's 'JAAS in action' heard about on the drunkandretired.com podcast http://jaasbook.wordpress.com/about/
If the book is in PDF format and is consistently formatted, it's not too difficult to bind it and make a real dead-tree book. All you need is a laser printer, some basic office equipment and supplies, and a way to build a general-purpose jig. You can find instructions here and there on the Internet, or just figure it out from scratch, which is what I did.
I made a perfect-bound copy of Siebel's "Practical Common Lisp" (500 pages) that I've been using heavily for three years now; rebound it once (it was my first try). Bound with white glue, medium stock cover. I also made a copy of "Linux Device Drivers" (600 pages) which currently just takes up space on the shelf ;)
Maíra Wenzel's Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mairaw/
MSDN Library is now featuring 44 chapters from 13 O’Reilly books on subjects such as C# 3.0, Visual Basic 2008, ADO.NET 3.5, .NET 3.5, the ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF Services, and ASP.NET 3.5.
And here’s the list of the books that have some of their chapters featured on the library:
ASP.NET:
Visual Studio 2008:
.NET Development:
Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. More methodology oriented though.
An Introduction to GCC - covers basic use of GCC, makefiles, the preprocessor, etc.
ENDED :-(
jQuery: Novice To Ninja is now free for 24 hours.
Expect this to finish around 8:45 PM UTC / 9:45 PM BST on 12th July 2010.
This may even continue until the end of the day, but try it and see.
An excellent book by Mark Pilgrim on all this great new web stuff including the canvas, video, geolocation, etc., APIs.
Communicating Sequential Processes by Tony Hoare. Check copyright as it cannot be freely distributed in certain countries.
Targeted at children, but it looks entertaining:
Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python:
http://inventwithpython.com/ (free online read)
Programming Scala seems to be the first free book on Scala, available online.
There is also:
a draft of "Pro Scala: Monadic Design Patterns for the Web" (not yet published).
"Exploring Lift" (a web framework), which was published earlier as "The Definitive Guide to Lift" (Google group for the book with the PDF version at the bottom of the page. Direct PDF link).
SQL: Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL by Richard T. Snodgrass. PDF version: most pages (5 MB) and pages 30-31 (0.4 MB).
The TCP/IP Guide. The online version is free, but a fee is required to get the off-line version. A hardcover book is also available.
97 things every programmer should know
I read it a few "things" per day over several months. Some of the "things" contradict some other "things" but they are worth reading. If you are interested here is an interview with the editor Kevlin Henney: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/97-things
I'm taking a class on Information Retrieval. We're using this excellent book which is available online:
Use The Index, Luke! - A Guide to Database Performance for Developers
license: CC-BY-NC-ND
Here is a list of 7 free E-Books, some of which may have already been posted here. http://amazedsaint.blogspot.com/2010/09/7-freely-available-e-booksguides-i.html
The list includes
I am putting up a Wiki to house all of this wonderful material on available books:
(The list was just begging for categorization for ease-of-reference).
http://programref.wikia.com/wiki/Programmer's_Reference_Wiki
Come over and edit it (see Style Guide first)!
I'm not really experienced at "wiki-fu," so I'll need some help with templates, site design, etc.
EDIT: I just noticed the categorized list in the top answer, and it looks good. However, I would like to flesh it out with more info (licenses), and then add compiler and libary information, so I think this might still be relevant.
What do you think?
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 US License Above link points to online / downloadable version. O'Reilly also publish a print version.
Very good book on learning the NLTK toolkit and learning Natural Language techniques.
Moving To Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 from Microsoft Press.
This book is for professional developers who are working with previous versions of Visual Studio and are looking to make the move to Visual Studio 2010 Professional.
"Seamsless object oriented software architecture" by Kim Valden and Jean-Marc Nerson
