Philip Greenspun is an interesting character. An instructor at MIT, he’s one those people that strikes me as “justifiably arrogant”, and has written two great books which are readily available online: Software Engineering for Internet Applications and SQL for Web Nerds. This second one focuses on Oracle – which is unusual for books that you can find free online – and actually helped me come up to speed with some of that RDBMS’ idiosyncrasies when I started at my current employer.
Another person who strikes me as “justifiably arrogant” would be Sherlock Holmes, and you can find The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes here. It contains the following Holmes stories:
- A Scandal in Bohemia
- The Red-Headed League
- A Case of Identity
- The Boscombe Valley Mystery
- The Five Orange Pips
- The Man with the Twisted Lip
- The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
- The Adventure of the Speckled Band (one of my favorites)
- The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
- The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
- The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
- The Adventure of the Copper Beeches