List of freely available programming books

One free book that I like is "The Z Notation: A Reference Manual" by Spivey. You can get a pdf version for free at http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/~mike/zrm/zrm.pdf. I would say that learning Z Notation had a bigger impact on my ability to understand and model software than anything else. It isn't exactly programming but it will teach you how to be a better software engineer. I never used it to prove program correctness or refinement but rather to express the relationships between the parts of a software system. It made me better at object oriented modeling.

There are several lists like this floating around, but this one is just amazingly comprehensive. Reading a subset of these books (and actually building stuff with the knowledge gained) will most likely provide one with a better education than all but the top-tier computer sci programs.

And the cost is $0. Now one might argue that a college cuts down on the time it takes to select courses, find and work with other students, get access to mentors, etc. But I doubt it. Whatever learning inefficiencies colleges address, other inefficiencies more than counteract those gains.

Consider that colleges also force you to spend more time on classes you could complete more quickly on your on, plus all the required coursework that might be completely unnecessary for your goals.

In theory, yes. The student would have to be highly self motivated, but this is actually how I learned to program, until I started joining open source projects. It's cost effective, and in my experience, the majority of engineering jobs (especially in startups) that such a student would apply for care more about your ability to code than your degree. A recent topic here actually showed that most programmers applying for a job can't do all but the simplest of programming tasks in languages they list on their resumés. There are fields where a degree is essential, like medical fields with a lot of hands on work. But the beauty of programming fields is that you can learn from the machine that is principally used in programming: the computer.

Brilliant! Scalable and modular CSS is a great read. Some good practices for anything where you're structuring files period, not even just CSS. Great list.

"Mining of Massive Datasets" and "Introduction to Information Retrieval" are both excellent college-level texts to their respective subjects.

Also, the machine learning book is available for free, "Elements of Statistical Learning":

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/download.ht...