Ask HN: Which are the best open source books? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which are the best open source books?

40 pointscrecker17 comments

Working in academy taught me one huge concept about editorial world. Some publishing houses that work exclusively for profit tend to focus more on the quantity than on the quality.

For some months by browsing HN, I've been amazed at how many open books written by normal people (self-published resources) that need to be discovered. So I was wondering: is there anywhere a list of "open" books? Let's give some authors some notoriety, if you found one, please comment below!

A books/resource to be defined as "open source" should have the following features:

- have a good quality content – it is a little bit hard to achieve, especially when you do not have money to hire editors;

- be free as PDF/HTML, but the author can still have donations, or can be paid for hardcopies;

- anyone can contribute to writing or editing! e.g. "source code"/content of the book is hosted in a Git instance;

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There are huge lists on freely available books on programming topics here (most would probably not fit your 3rd point though):

* https://ebookfoundation.github.io/free-programming-books/boo...

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All my books are free to read online and markdown sources are available on GitHub: https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks

I love those! Was wondering if there were any other topics not related to programming that might need the same love.

Thanks for sharing.

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces. Very well written read, a fantastic textbook overall.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

The architecture of opensource applications: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html

I read this book years ago, and still read it now.

"How to think like a Computer Scientist" is really good. We are working on updating it at learnpythontherightway.com. I have enjoyed working with the source.

E.g. of an open source book: https://hefferon.net/linearalgebra/index.html "Linear Algebra" by Jim Hefferon.

I love the crafting interpreters book, https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters

Computer Networks: A Systems Approach by Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie https://book.systemsapproach.org/

> - anyone can contribute to writing or editing! e.g. "source code"/content of the book is hosted in a Git instance;

Open source doesn't mean open to contributions! For example, SQLite is open-source, but is not open to contributions: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

> SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution.

There's also an article by Rich Harris that explain the difference between open source and open contribution: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95.... An extract:

> Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement.

You meant "Rich Hickey", right ?

I do, I even remember correcting that but it looks like I didn't.

I created a repository of the open books marked in Library of Congress records here: locserendipity.com. Some of the best books, in my opinion, were written by Jack London. This randomizer will help you identify Project Gutenberg books: https://www.locserendipity.com/Gutenberg.html. This one helps identify modern books with Wikipedia pages: https://locserendipity.com/Books.html. The best open-source book I found from that source was The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_I...).

Wikibooks has a great one on bash scripting https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bash_Shell_Scripting

The bible

I doubt that you could contribute to it, but it's a nice example. Thanks!

The Torah has not been accepting contributions for a long time, but there has been successful Torah fanfiction so you can go that route. Some of that has been so successful it has become its own thing and people write fanfiction for the fanfiction, much like "Fifty Shades of Grey" started off as "Twilight" fanfiction but then became its own thing with its own fanfiction and with fans that might not have read "Twilight".

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