I need books that I can’t buy, I drink beer that I can’t sip

Hmm. That's a neat idea. Although I have an American Library in my city. It has a one or two unique titles but I couldn't find anything for LISP and neither for Python or Ruby. It did have Code Complete.

If someone made a Firefox plugin that converts the volume of text which has a appeared at a users screen for more than 10 seconds to A4 pages, I am sure a typical Internet user reads more than 100 pages daily. For example the Wikipedia article for "Common Lisp" in print view will be printed to 19(!) pages. And it appears so short. You can make notes in notepad (the real thing) if you like to think about the problem outside - notes are great thing by themselves.

You will have to do the exercises eventually and so there is no escape from the screen. I usually read a book about programming by executing the examples and solving the exercises while occasionally looking at the text for some guidance when I am stuck.. has anyone read a programming book which is ~100% executable (no cheating with excessive comments ;-))?

I just finished reading a 688 page (according to Amazon's listing of the paper book) scifi novel on my phone yesterday, it took me about a week of leisurely reading. It's only one such novel in a long, long, long list of ebooks I have been reading on my phone since mid-2007.

I have read all sorts of other books in such a format. It ends up saving me lots of money, and if I just reformat the text to something I am more comfortable with (i.e. a pdf 2 pages side by side), it can be awesome. No need to drag 10+lbs of textbooks to classes and I can store hundreds of books between my iPhone and my laptop from the aforementioned textbooks to leisure reading.

Yes, I do prefer to have a paper copy of some books, but when resources are limited, there isn't much you can do. Online copies/ebooks can be amazing in that respect. I had a subscription to Safari Books Online until I found out either ACM or IEEE (can't remember...) had access to most of the books I wanted, and I also discovered my college library had Safari access that I also occasionally use. To me it costs less to access those hundreds of books online than to buy a single dead tree book every year, and I live in the United States.

> I guess not.

Is this to imply e-books are a detriment to your study? My reading material, long and short, is almost exclusively digital now. In fact, I get very disappointed when there isn't a digital version. I'm close to an evangelist so I'll defend it to great lengths if you challenge me.

I will admit though, this is very much personal taste. But taste is the least of your worries if you're trying to learn, especially CS.

The day I found the SICP pdf, man was I happy.

Yes. I watched all of the lectures and read the entire book.

The point is that you don't need money for books to learn CS. You just need a laptop and the ability to get online.

They have these things called printers here...

I've read SICP online. Also most things I learned about programming I have learned online. Books tend to lag behind the current technology trends.

I have read more than half of all programming books I read on my computer. I find that with a laptop and a good lcd screen, it's not much of a problem... (and I move too much to bother with hardcopies)

Can you say more about Gigapedia?

The site seems fishy: there's little info unless you register (which I have not yet), and registration requires a Google account.