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Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#101

Post by ericssmith »

gandalfu wrote: post #55
ericssmith wrote: post #10

How to Design Programs 2E http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ This book is much more than the intro to programming that it appears to be. It is a foundational approach for producing robust programs, regardless of your implementation language or level of experience.

Unfortunately it looks like the authors never completed the next book on the series about real time programming. How to design worlds. http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/

Thanks for pointing this out. I was interested to see they credit Paul Hudak's "Haskell School of Expression" for inspiration. I will have to take a fresh look at that given my newfound appreciation of HTDP (due to stumbling across Norman Ramsey's assessment of it). Also need to look deeper into Hudak's FRP now that I think about it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#102

Post by EFruit »

okal wrote: post #23

I built http://hackershelf.com just for this. It's a crowdsourced listing of legally free books on just about any topic.

In the past month or so I've been using it astoundingly often. I really enjoy having such a site available and I appreciate the generosity of it all, but it could really (IMHO) use a cleanup. Perhaps a pass over the book URLs for 404s, cleaning/merging the duplicate categories, and perhaps a more rigorous way of preventing them from happening again (suggesting existing topics on the submit form?) I'm sure there are plenty of people here that would be happy to contribute content, code, design, or whatever.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#103

Post by mindcrime »

anthony_romeo wrote: post #86

Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don't believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action. I'm not here to debate the meri…

but they don't believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action

To be fair, that doesn't mean they are wrong. Certainly we've seen plenty of cases where people built incredibly complex, elegant and expressive models of economic systems, which turned out to be completely broken.

That said, I know of at least some Austrian economists who think the Austrian school should make some effort to better ground their ideas with mathematical formulations, but I haven't followed things closely enough to know if much, or any, work has actually been done in that regard.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#105

Post by anthony_romeo »

[deleted] wrote: post #100
anthony_romeo wrote: post #86

Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don't believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action. I'm not here to debate the meri…

[deleted]

MIT's opencourseware would be a good start. They often have links to free textbooks. Their course on Principals of Microeconomics (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-01sc-principles-of-m...) has a free textbook.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#106

Post by wfn »

rifung wrote: post #49
cp9 wrote: post #5

Sicp is available for free https://sicpebook.wordpress.com/ebook/

Wow I had no idea you could get this for free! Thank you!

Just to be clear, the official publisher page for SICP includes (and in fact) hosts the contents of it: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ (includes links to programming assignments etc.)

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#107

Post by anthony_romeo »

mindcrime wrote: post #103
anthony_romeo wrote: post #86

Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don't believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action. I'm not here to debate the meri…

but they don't believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action To be fair, that doesn't mean they are wrong. Certainly we've seen plenty of cases where people built incredibly complex, elegant and expressive models of economic systems, which turned out to be completely broken. That said…

Oh, I completely agree. It's important to be critical. This is why there are several branches of economics. It's just that if someone unfamiliar with the field wanted to know about economics in general, I wouldn't have them first read Das Kapital or start by showing them papers from the Heritage Foundation or CATO. This sort of reading comes later. Build a foundation first before building a house.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#108

Post by hodwik »

anthony_romeo wrote: post #86

Just a bit of caution. The Ludwig von Mises Institute is a group devoted to specifically advocating one branch of economics, Austrian Economics. Part of this branch is staunch Libertarianism, but they don't believe in several aspects which are typical in mainstream economic branches, such as using statistical modeling and mathematics to draw conclusions about economic status or action. I'm not here to debate the meri…

In a chaotic system, arriving at abstractions of the forces at play often gives a more illuminating picture than trying to model those systems from weakly-linked data points.

It's not that Austrian economists can't find their own data models to defend their positions, with an area like economics finding data to support your opinions is the easy part.

Rather, we've found that obsessing over the data provides very little understanding of the underlying cause-and-effect of economics.

It's like neurology. Yes, it's a terribly interesting field, but you'll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust.

Re: Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?

#110

Post by fortytw2 »

jsingleton wrote: post #28

A few of these are already posted (or will be) but here you go: - https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/ - http://www.withouthotair.com/ - http://www.harriman-house.com/book/view/1057/business/dave-c... - http://hpmor.com/ - http://www.linuxvoice.com/creative-commons-issues/

Adding to the suggestion of HPMOR, Worm (https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/1-1/) is excellent and well worth a read.
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