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136 pointsCieplak33 comments

Managing Projects with Make 3rd edition http://oreilly.com/openbook/make3/book/index.csp

This is the definitive reference to the software that lifts you from writing software to building software systems.

See also http://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/ for why it's still a useful book, 27 years after the first edition. Compare that to most of the technical books you own; most of which were hopelessly obsolete by the ripe age of 27 months.

Actually I find it quite sad.

It means many developers are doing software in 2013 as if their main system was a System V one, stuck in 1977.

Not quite, a linux system of ~2010 has several advances over a Unix system/V from the late 1970's it's a late 1960s muscle car compared to the Model A of PDP-11. Same basic technology under the hood, but refined and much better understood.

Most of the "advanced" programming environments look very nice but fail to meet the needs of real world usage; where you have to talk to other systems and get dirty doing it.

If you are writing C or C++ software, please use something like CMake. Not everyone is using GNU, the same compiler, or the same editor/IDE. At the very least CMake can create GNU make files, Visual C++'s nmake files, Visual Studio projects and Xcode projects.

>Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/index.html

I'm familiar with the general gist of the FSF's philosophies but I had never really sat down and read an in-depth write up of the importance of Free Software, so I'm looking forward to reading this :)

I found it good and think you can look forward to reading it.

Thanks! Just finished reading the first chapter and I found it to be surprisingly well written.

> Through its Open Library project, the Internet Archive is scanning and hosting PDF versions of our open books.

scanning?? I would have thought that O'Reilly could give text/source to the Internet Archive that could be massaged into a better quality output product. (And allow formats other than just PDF -- text/epub/mobi/etc.)

I wouldn't be surprised if the originals are lost.

There is also Learning JavaScript Design Patterns.

It's an O'Reilly book, and it's under creative commons, but it's not on that list.

You can find it here:

http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/bo...

Does HN have any good picks from this list?

I see a lot of out of print books and books not about programming/software development, so if there are any that someone could recommend from this massive list I'd appreciate that.

Definitely 'the cathedral and the bazaar' which is imho a classic.

A lot of the stuff in it is out of date, but `Unix Text Processing' is a great read, if only to get a feel for the concepts and ideas.

That title caught my eye also. Not much difference between Unix text processing then, and now.

The Cathedral and the Bizaar and the Open Sources books, give a nice historical background. The Open Sources book have many nice essays from different contributors. I particulary enjoyed reading about the history of Unix transforming into a free OS, and Larry Wall's onion analogy.

Grief, I had dead tree versions of the XView books back in 1993. Back when dealing with X was Proper Work. None of this GNOME bullshit.

Yeah - doing X work was "my job" for a few years in the early nineties. The various O'Reilly XLib/Xt books were a godsend. Still have 'em somewhere in the garage.

I also have a few of those sitting in boxes in my garage. Every time I do some cleaning-up, I debate (just for a second!) whether I should dispose of them, but end up keeping them.

And the amount of X calls matched Win32 to do anything proper.

I bought The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog in early 1994. I had an account at NERDC, a 9600 baud Intel modem, and connection time was $0.01/minute. One month my bill was over $20.00.

That's a lot of Gopher and Usenet.

I'm surprised that there isn't any Fortran guides or manuals on how to maintain VT100 terminals on the list.

:-)

Just checked, they don't have no TECO manuals.

Open Feedback Publishing System from O'Reilly is another source http://ofps.oreilly.com/

Many of these books are out-of-print for a reason - they're not really relevant in todays tech landscape. There's a few gems in here though.

And those are...?

My choices for the "good" ones are:

The PNG book: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/book/toc.html

The GNU Make book: http://oreilly.com/openbook/make3/book/index.csp

The Subversion book: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

And I haven't read it, but I would guess "Making TeX Work" is still relevant: http://makingtexwork.sourceforge.net/mtw/

I've found Unix Text Processing (http://oreilly.com/openbook/utp/) to be very very helpful when trying to some data processing I would normally do in excel.

It says that Archive.org is producing pdfs of these books, but I'm not having any luck finding the Managing Projects with Make as a pdf. Anyone else see it?

EDIT: I misunderstood, it's at archive.org's openlibrary project: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL3823216W/Managing_projects_wi...

I was excited to find one book as html broken into chapters, but the others are in various formats - there isn't much consistancy - which makes it difficult to read them, or write my own glue code - to get them onto my e-reader.

The list of out of print books is twice as long as those still in print.

Oh man, a book on Mason! That takes me back to some good old Perl days.

Good

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