Microsoft eBook Giveaway | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft eBook Giveaway

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

73 pointsdabber25 comments

I downloaded a couple of SQL, data science books. These "books" are white papers or program tutorials. Also the writing style of blog post (with so many FREE in red font) does not inspire any confidence in the quality of these "books".

> Also the writing style of blog post (with so many FREE in red font)

I think it was intentional, the way I see it the author was just mocking those "free ebook" marketing pages which are as terrible as common...

You're giving the author too much credit, considering how most of the "ebooks" have less content than a blog post, and that his title is "Director - Sales Excellence".

You're giving your intuition too much credit, by judging someone's writing based on one single post when the rest of his blog is just one click away :-p

>BizTalk Server 2016 Licensing Datasheet

>Excel 2013 Keyboard Shortcuts

>Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 Pricing and Licensing FAQs

>Office 365 Licensing Brief

"""ebooks"""

Here's a pastebin [0] with all the PDF urls concatenated if you want to download them all.

[0]: https://pastebin.com/H3KsMHW6

And Powershell script here:

https://pastebin.com/S81DGVg9

[Edit]

In total everything comes in around 3.4GiB. I found this in /r/homelabs and they've got all the files up on their US and EU FTP servers. Details here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/wiki/resources/ftp

That is AWESOME! Beat me to it!

Is that the same powershell script linked from the page (I can't access pastebin)? I'm getting the error "unexpected token 'in $books'". If I remove the for loop I get the error "The term 'Invoke-WebRequest $book -Method Head ' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet.

No it's different. It's from the top comment in the reddit post[0]. Seems like others in that thread have had the same issue with the one from the article. The issue seems to be the script doesn't create the directory for you[1] so you need to make it first.

However, I'm more of a Bash guy so please take my words/links with a grain of salt.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/6mtqdq/a_tonne_of_...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/6mtqdq/a_tonne_of_...

Thanks for putting this together. Here is a way to grab them all with gnu tooling

curl https://pastebin.com/raw/H3KsMHW6 | sed s/\;/\\n/g | xargs wget --trust-server-names

or if you have parallel installed simply use

curl https://pastebin.com/raw/H3KsMHW6 | sed s/\;/\\n/g | parallel wget --trust-server-names

I highly recommend .NET Microservices: Architecture for Containerized .NET Applications. It's pretty good if you're interested in Microservices at all, the containerization bits are icing.

If people are being the PDFs and find margins that make viewing difficult, I highly recommend the "briss" PDF trimming tool. Scripting it doesn't really work that well, but if you run the .jar, then open 1 file (possibly telling it to skip 1 page /the cover), then pick Actions, Convert it's reasonably quick and gives a nicely trimmed PDF suitable for reading on plenty of screens.

This is awesome!

For those that want to grab all from the commandline in linux, get either the text file on the site (and remove the first line), or one of the lists posted here, with the following command (will correctly name the files):

$ cat <list_file_name> | xargs wget --content-disposition

My favourite is

$ cat <list_file_name> | parallel -j20 --gnu "wget {}"

Downloaded them in a few seconds!

Nice! Right now I'm stuck on an older single core machine with limited bandwidth anyway :(

I prefer to use

    aria2c -j 20 -i <list_file_name>

no need to use cat, wget supports this directly!

    wget --content-disposition -i list.txt

TIL...

The developer section seems to be padded with outdated junk:

* Moving to Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010

* Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

* Programming Windows® Phone 7 (Special Excerpt 2)

Do you think it's a bit extreme when you need to write books to explain product licensing?

Any recommendations for a developer that doesn't use any MS tools? :)

As interesting as a free AOL installation disk giveaway

Once upon a time that meant a free diskette ready to format. Still not super useful at the time, yeah.

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