Free Classic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org | Hacker News Reader

Free Classic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org

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279 pointsakaralar36 comments

I wonder how they define "classics" - two of my cherished titles from MIT Press are "IBM's Early Computers" (1985) and "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems" (1991).

They're examples of what I consider "The Perfect Computer Book".

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ibms-early-computers

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ibms-360-and-early-370-system...

I started my career coding System 370 assembler. I'm curious as to what constitutes your perfect computer book.

Depth of information, organization, etc. I wish there were more books like these covering other platforms - like one about DEC's minicomputers, another covering Cray, etc.

Plus they're nice and thick, without a third of it being indexes and footnotes.

Another vote that both of these are great books - richly informative, classics of history of computing/technology. I own hardcover 1st editions of both.

Have you read Tracy Kidder's book Soul of a New Machine? If so, what did you think?

I read it five or six years ago and I loved it.

Yes, I read it in the mid-80s and loved it, and own multiple copies. Steven Levy's _Hackers_ is a similarly good book.

I found out years later that one of the moderators on a discussion site I frequent is Tom West's daughter, and I sold her a laptop at one point.. Isn't it weird how "small" the world can be?

IBM's actual mainframe-product manuals (hardware and software) were frighteningly thorough, as I recall... even those that were probably read in detail a few hundred times (ever, anywhere) at most.

Yes, I cut my teeth in technical reading on the 370 PoPs manual (Principals of Operations). IIRC it was the authoritative assembler reference. Many IBM manuals had a distinctive turn of phrase for operations which would crash. I can't remember exactly what it was, but something like "results will be unpredictable".

Nothing starts your day quite like a 3:00AM call to come in and resolve an "Abend - S0C7".

In the Production Control Center (liason between operations and the programming organizations), we loved S0C7s because they were pretty much always program errors rather than difficult-to-diagnose hardware issues.

Direct link: https://archive.org/details/mitpress?sort=-downloads

There's about 4 times as many books with this link:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=publisher%3A%22MIT+Pres...

I'm not 100% sure what the difference is, I just noticed that one book I'd been able to borrow didn't show up on your list:

https://archive.org/details/turtlegeometry00haro

Hard not to think of Aaron Swartz when reading something like this…

What does it mean, "This item is restricted":

https://archive.org/details/aircraftenginesg00kerr_0

From the article:

  “Together with MIT Press, we will enable the patrons of every
  library that owns one of these books to borrow it online–one
  copy at a time.”

Looks like Archive.org will be hosting it, but you'll have to go through a library to access it. It's an improvement, but not freeing the books entirely.

EDIT: I can't figure out a pattern. I can check out some, but not others with no discernible pattern. No connection to a library, just my Archive.org account.

Baby steps. Having Archive.org host a canonical copy forever is a huge leap forward compared to losing digital content to the ages.

How do you "borrow something online" ?

If I download a file from a server, I am sent a copy of the file. They only way I can "borrow" something online, is if they sent me a copy of the file, and then deleted their copy after I received my copy. Then we have to follow the same process in reverse when I "return" the file.

I didn't try downloading. Presumably some sort of DRM on that. I was reading the book through some web-based interface. When borrowed, it gave me 14 days access to it. Then it'd be automatically returned and I'd have to get in line to borrow it again to continue reading.

> Looks like Archive.org will be hosting it, but you'll have to go through a library to access it. It's an improvement, but not freeing the books entirely.

How is it prevented that I simply get a book, copy it and give it back?

The libraries use DRM enabled e-readers to lend content. Overdrive seems to be the most popular one for US libraries AFAICT.

Perhaps you can enlist the help of an Apprentice to repair the corruption in the file.

Luckily every DRM system hasn't been cracked, so it wasn't all pointless and annoying

Did you know the most recent Amazon DRM hasn't been cracked yet?

Did they update all their kindles to support it? Or can you still get everything in the old DRM format?

Which computer science books should I watch out for? I am a software developer but without a CS degree and I'd like to learn more CS fundamentals.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

And the books in the "The Little Schemer" series.

I would also suggest "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" but this is not from MIT Press.

MIT Press has published SICP online for free for years.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Under CC-SA nonetheless. In fact, Hal Abelson (one of the authors of SICP) was also one of the founders of Creative Commons. Moreover the other author (Gerald J. Sussman) is in the board of directors of the FSF.

FYI, there's a "gray market" paperback version of the AI text you mention available from Amazon at a very reasonable price--about 10% of the standard US version. This is the textbook for at least one AI-related edX MOOC (Columbia).

SICP is already available online for free.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Thanks! And cool, the Little Schemer books is actually how I first started programming.

A good list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626259

"Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms", Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Making classic MIT books available for free is only a tiny part of the many important things Archive.org is doing. The GOOD WORKS of the Archive is worthy of your financial support. https://archive.org/donate/ to support the cause.

Explore the website, http://archive.org, and discover the amazing collection.

Archive.org is one of the greatest sites in the world right now. The only negative thing that I have to say about it is the retroactive removal of sites that have a anti-bot stance on robots.txt (even if it does not ban archive.org specifically). I would understand if they did not crawl sites that had such a robots.txt but I find the retroactive removal a dangerous policy.

It's unfortunate but they operate in a sufficiently grey area of law that they really need to bend over backwards to comply with the wishes of someone who owns or may own the content. I don't particularly like it either but I understand why they feel it's a prudent policy.

If internet access is a human right, which I believe the UN said it is? Well, then we could have special laws for internet archival? Much like we have laws that prevent the destruction of historical sites. It's not that anybody is making a quick buck at the expense of somebody else.

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