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Show HN: DevFreeBooks – A collection of free books for developers

devfreebooks.github.io

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Re: Show HN: DevFreeBooks – A collection of free books for developers

#62

Am I the only one who dislikes these free resource type collections? One, they present too many choices of dubious value. The most important part of book recommendations is a vetting of a few resources that are guaranteed to be enlightening. Two, the monetary cost of a book isn't the largest "cost". The largest cost is the time spent reading the book, which again means that the most value that can be added is through…

Monetary cost of the book is the only cost for me. For many programming books, reading them cover to cover is a bad idea. You won’t retain information and you might even go against the motivations of the book. I like these ebooks because they’re a reference that works offline. If I have a question about a design pattern, or a bad practice, or about a feature of the language, I can reference the book in seconds. Skimming the book to get a summary of its materials, I can, in under an hour, learn when its material is applicable. Then, if I need it later, I can search it with a simple ctrl-f to build the knowledge.

Programming is a lot of material, but it’s repetitive enough that you have near infinite opportunities to practice it. You don’t need to cram, you just need to practice. For the things that aren’t repetitive but may still come up, there is Google and ctrl-f in your pdf reader of choice.

And I disagree with you about dubious value being a concern. If you’re going to bother using the book, you can bother Googling it to see if it is valuable.

Re: Show HN: DevFreeBooks – A collection of free books for developers

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the forks are a form of bookmarking. At least for my part, I fork every single repository that might even be slightly interesting for me in the future. Hell, I even fork repos that I explicitly hate, just so I can keep tabs on them or learn more about them.

You hate some repos?

Do you like systemd?

Re: Show HN: DevFreeBooks – A collection of free books for developers

#65
post #25

looks like getting started with django isn't a thing anymore

This link was fixed minutes ago! Thanks for the report!

http://gettingstartedwithdjango.com/en/lessons/introduction-...

doesn't appear to resolve.

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