Show HN: DevFreeBooks – A collection of free books for developers
devfreebooks.github.io
devfreebooks.github.io
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 the vetting of the contents of the book compared to all other alternatives.
That's a difficult thing to make since you have to be subjective when suggesting a resource.
For example, in awesome-scifi's novels section[0], we as the maintainers try to tackle this project by requesting from the PR submitter to add a subjective description on why the submitter thinks that the novel in question is awesome (backed up by the name of the submitter so you know exactly who wrote that description), to add a Goodreads rating at the time of submitting a PR, and an emoji if it contains more than 100k ratings on Goodreads (indicating that it's a popular one).
Now, I'm obviously being subjective when talking about a list I'm one of the maintainers of, but when I'm searching for a book, I get to see if it has a good rating, if it got a lot of ratings, and a subjective description of why the person who submitted it thinks it's awesome. It works rather well in my case.
Is that going to be true for all people around the world, regardless of income? Sure it's probably true for you or I, but free learning resources are likely to be vital for many others.
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.
I'd suggest allowing users to submit short reviews of each ebook. I'd imagine it would be useful to have some insight as to which book would be most helpful for different circumstances - especially once you start to get some more submissions and there are more books per category.
From the link, here's a quote:
>There have been other pages of recommended reading on Less Wrong before (and elsewhere), but this post is unique. Here are the rules:
- Post the title of your favorite textbook on a given subject.
- You must have read at least two other textbooks on that same subject.
- You must briefly name the other books you've read on the subject and explain why you think your chosen textbook is superior to them.
What's the point in forking a project like this? Adding changes and submitting pull requests would be the obvious thing, but that doesn't seem to be the case because there are only 4K commits and less than 30 open pull requests. So anybody know what's up with all the forks?
> Hell, I even fork repos that I explicitly hate, just so I can keep tabs on them or learn more about them.
I don't know what it means to "hate" a repo, but whatever it means, forking the repo actually means you won't be keeping tabs on them because your personal fork will have no activity until you pull from the original. And if you need to go to the original to get updates, why not just go straight there?
But forking has its benefits if you want to make sure that the original repository does not disappear.
https://leanpub.com/firefoxosinaction
I would suggest making submitting a book easier through an online form, though. The process of forking, editing a raw JSON file, and submitting a pull request seems a little primitive, and has a high cost to those who want to contribute.
Thank you for your time and energy making this resource!
Also the necessary skills to submit a book overlap a lot with the skills of the people who might be interested.
Vote gets multiplied with the number of correct answers. Everyone wins.
Edit: A ballot in itself, although a ballet in itself also works...
I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. In school we were taught a great deal of the Civil Rights movement, as much of it happened in our city and state. In particular, this "test" suggestion makes me recall the literacy tests [1] instituted in the Jim Crow south.
> Is the action motivated by knowledge better to the uninformed one?
Well yes, obviously, but it's better to try to force people to be informed than to ignore them. As you may have noticed, people don't like being ignored.
And even if people are informed, it does not mean they would chose according to that knowledge, since I think a lot of people vote not according to their brain, but follow their emotions or the expectations of their social group.
[1] http://pyvideo.org/ [2] https://github.com/pyvideo/pyvideo/wiki/How-to-Contribute-Me...
Maybe it's something for a DMCA takedown, but it doesnt look like the average pirating website(i surely dont know how they look like, was never on one, i swear!)
EDIT: Please elaborate why that get downvoted. I seriously dont know. I could understand, if it gets FLAGGED, but... it didn't.
"awesome WHAT_I_NEED"
find the awesome git repo and follow the links,
if I find anything interesting I search for the link on hn and reddit and try to see if there are any discussions based on the link.
profit??
doesn't appear to resolve.