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Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

#61

Post by WickyNilliams »

daveloyall wrote: post #10

This book profoundly changed how I look at computers (and other things). http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/ Petzold's style is narrative, but make no mistake: every sentence is carefully chosen. I recommend resisting the urge to skim, lest you have to backtrack later...

I never got all the way through this book. Started reading it and loved it. The narrative and conversational style is very welcoming. At the time I had a friend who was starting to learn programming so I loaned it to him hoping it would help/inspire him.

I had completely forgot I owned this book, thanks for reminding me! My friend has since given up on programming so I'll definitely get it back :)

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

#62

Post by rayalez »

> "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach"

I think it is one of the best books written on any topic ever period.

It is kinda advanced but also brilliant, and was a turning point in my decision to master hacking.

> Now I am reading "Two Scoops of Django" and enjoying it A LOT.

It's closer to a beginner/intermediate level, and it brings me a lot of joy and excitement about programming.

> Another one is "Hackers & Painters", of course. PG is brilliant, nuff said.

His book "ANSI Common Lisp" is definitely on the top of my reading list, I've already started and it is great.

> Just to mention, a little less technical book is "Ghost In The Wires" by Kevin Mitnick, a famous hacker.

I'm listening the audiobook now and it is really inspiring, entertaining and fantastic.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

#64

Post by presty »

rayalez wrote: post #62

> "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" I think it is one of the best books written on any topic ever period. It is kinda advanced but also brilliant, and was a turning point in my decision to master hacking. > Now I am reading "Two Scoops of Django" and enjoying it A LOT. It's closer to a beginner/intermediate level, and it brings me a lot of joy and excitement about programming. > Another one is "Hackers & P…

> It is kinda advanced

I disagree. It's used as an introductory book on AI classes and it's a very broad book covering enough surface on different AI topics. But if you want to go deep, you have to dig into academic papers

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

#66

Post by acjohnson55 »

Javascript Allongé by Reg Braithwaite was an incredible book, not just for changing how I viewed Javascript, but it also taught me a lot about programming as a whole. It taught me a lot of lessons in factoring functions into orthogonal concerns that have been highly influential on my coding style in all languages ever since.

Available free in HTML form: https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge/read

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

#67

Post by Gallefray »

zokier wrote: post #38
Erwin wrote: post #33

I enjoyed "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" back when there we had multiple UNIX operating systems and probably more versions of standards than operating systems. Stevens carefully documented every detail (in a way where you could learn about what was going on; I also had the POSIX standards at the time which were not readable). The book had some nice typesetting which I believe was done in the mystery l…

> I enjoyed "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" back when there we had multiple UNIX operating systems and probably more versions of standards than operating systems. You were bit ahead of your time if you were reading ebooks back then.

Not really. ARPANET has existed since '69, and UNIX came into existence in '70. IIRc they were sharing files across ARPANET in '75. People transcribed files :P

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

#68

Post by Gallefray »

zokier wrote: post #38
Erwin wrote: post #33

I enjoyed "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" back when there we had multiple UNIX operating systems and probably more versions of standards than operating systems. Stevens carefully documented every detail (in a way where you could learn about what was going on; I also had the POSIX standards at the time which were not readable). The book had some nice typesetting which I believe was done in the mystery l…

> I enjoyed "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" back when there we had multiple UNIX operating systems and probably more versions of standards than operating systems. You were bit ahead of your time if you were reading ebooks back then.

Welp, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment came out in '92. Probably a distributed plain text file I'd imagine.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best technical eBook you have read?

#70

Post by wiseleo »

There are just so many...

Headfirst series (JavaScript, HTML, jQuery... all of them)

Discover Meteor

Refactoring: improving the design of existing code

Database design for mere mortals

MIT books (SICP, Algorithms)

Oh, and of course... Human Interface Guidelines by Apple. One of the best UX books on app design.

All books are ebooks for me, so this list is impossibly long.

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