Free Computer Book!

Posted by David N. Welton Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:59:00 GMT

I've recently finished writing an article for Free Software Magazine, who, as part of sponsorship deals, are able to distribute a free book to their authors.

I thought that that would be easy enough, but on second thought, I'm actually not sure... These days I'm reticent to get books on things that are documented on the web - those sorts of books tend to get stale pretty quickly. I think I'm more in the market for a 'classic', but even there, I'm not really sure. I have a lot of good ones already (scroll down on this page: http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/), and as you can see from that list, "documentation" style books quickly become dated. To tell the truth, I haven't actually bought any computer books in a while, having focused more on marketing, business, economics and the like, which aren't "documented" online as thoroughly as most programming topics are.

So, I'm lookng for suggestions. One possibility is the recent Erlang book by Joe Armstrong, but even that is mostly covered by docs on the erlang.org web site.

Free Software Magazine's publishing sponsors are: Apress, Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall, O’Reilly, No Starch and Packt - and I can select any book from them, to my knowledge.

Suggestions? Thanks!

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Comments

  1. Daniel Lopez said about 2 hours later:

    Ciao David,

    Definitely, "Founders at Work" from Apress, you will enjoy it :)

  2. ak said about 3 hours later:

    Since you mentioned the Erlang book by Joe Armstrong... I personally find that book didactically better than any of the tutorials and introductions that you can find on the web.

  3. David N. Welton said about 3 hours later:

    Hi Daniel, I already have 'Founders at Work', and I enjoyed it a lot, actually!

  4. Bernd Zeimetz said about 3 hours later:

    What about the Cookbook for geeks? http://www.oreillynet.com/fyi/blog/2007/05/daskochbuchfuergeeks1.html

    not sure if there's an english translation and how it is called.

  5. Roland said about 3 hours later:

    One particular range of books that's not going to go stale anytime soon is about LaTeX. If you do any amount of it, the LaTeX Companion could be a good pick, and I don't think it's on the web.

  6. David N. Welton said about 5 hours later:

    Already have a LaTeX book:-)

    I am quite a book collector, actually, if I had infinite quantities of money, I'd fill my house with them.

  7. Rob Jessop said about 6 hours later:

    "Beautiful Code"

  8. riffraff said 1 day later:

    I was going to scream "CTM!" (aka: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming) but maybe it's not available in your list. "Code Reading" is a book I liked. And maybe "Extreme Programming Explained", which may be slightly hypey, but not much.

  9. petunjuk said 1 day later:

    Software engineering books won't get stale for some foreseeable future.

    http://www.freetechbooks.com/forum-15.html

    You'll find some agile readings too.

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