Free Online Books - 2

Jeffrey A. Carver’s entire series The Chaos Chronicles is joined today by Text Processing in Python, an incredibly handy book.

Today, we’ll focus on Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society Lessig is the author of “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” and an expert on the issues of copyright and “copyleft”.

His lecture video is “here”:rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/digital/digitalfuture030305.rm?start=1:25.0, as well as his books The Future of Ideas [pdf] and Free Culture.

Charles Stross’ ‘Accelerando!’ – I have this as a paperback, as well. A fun read.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! – I’d love to, but I still haven’t managed to get a working GHC.

I’ve linked to this before, but The Big Online Book of Linux Ada Programming is awesome. Ada is a fun language that has seen lots of use in NASA.

The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It is available in a number of formats, including PDF, HTML, and an “Annotated” version – from their site:

With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

And, since we’ve passed the ‘halfway point’, I’m going to include a movie. His Girl Friday, #19 on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Laughs as well as being selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry is a great comedy that has recently hit the public domain. Enjoy it.

Higher-Order Perl is a good example of using a language in ways that probably weren’t intended by its creator(s), but there are some great concepts in it that really helped me start to think about “Higher-order programming”.

Prof. Lessig’s Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace [pdf] is another great mind-changing book – only focusing on how the Internet is redefining constitutional law.

If you’re working with the PostgreSQL database engine (such as the one backing this blog), Practical PostgreSQL is an incredibly handy book to keep around.

The Forlorn has pretty good reviews – one Amazon reviewer called it “reminiscent of Andre Norton’s early books”, which is a pretty favorable comparison in my esitmation.

Since I just posted about Subversion, I should point out that I actually use git as my front-end suite to svn these days. It’s a large (and often confusing) piece of software, which is why I’m glad there’s git Magic

Jack London’s White Fang is a pretty fun book – I mean, it’s about dogs – I hate dogs – but I still enjoyed this book.

Even though I’ve been administering and using the Subversion VCS since before it hit 1.0, I still find myself referring back to the O’Reilly manual Version Control with Subversion quite often.

Edwin Abbott’s Flatland was given to me by my sixth-grade teacher, and I still enjoy it today.

This week’s “video lecture”:rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/digital/digitalfuture121304.rm?start=:27.0 is from Brewster Kahle, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, and originator of the print-on-demand Bookmobile. Therefore, it seems only appropriate to link to two books available in the Internet Archive.

First, there’s Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming [pdf].

Secondly, how about Richard F. Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 (sometimes called “1,001 Arabian Nights”).

Programming Pearls is a book Steve McConnell describes as “celebration of design in the small”.

I haven’t yet read it myself, but Sisters of Glass has gotten some pretty good reviews.

I first came across Paul Graham when I read his On Lisp – however, I found many of his other writings very interesting. If you haven’t read it, I’d like to recommend Why Nerds are Unpopular as a starting point.

The first Orson Scott Card I ever read was almost certainly the original 1978 “Novelette” version of Ender’s Game

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, one of the texts you’ll need if you want to take the Utah State University “Open CourseWare” course ECE7680 – Information Theory.

Intrusion Detection with SNORT: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID [pdf], part of the Bruce Perens’ Open Source Series.

Also, the fine folks at Project Gutenberg bring us Moby Dick.

Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns is an interesting book – if you look at the left-hand side, you’ll notice that the author is attempting to adapt the body of the text to multiple programming languages, including such surprising choices as Lua, Perl, and PHP.

On the fiction front, we have John Sundman’s novel, Acts of the Apostles, described as a “techno-thriller novel”.

Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash

1632 by Eric Flint – I don’t normally go in for “historical fiction”, especially not this sort, but I REALLY enjoyed this book (as well as the others in the series, which you can expect to find in future posts)