
Free O'Reilly Books - Cieplak
http://oreilly.com/openbook/
======
olefoo
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.

~~~
pjmlp
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.

~~~
olefoo
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.

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hkmurakami
_> 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 :)

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

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

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bstpierre
> 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.)

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

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bravura
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...](http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/)

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hayksaakian
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.

~~~
koralatov
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.

~~~
D9u
That title caught my eye also. Not much difference between Unix text
processing then, and now.

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zimpenfish
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.

~~~
adrianhoward
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.

~~~
prakashk
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.

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brudgers
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.

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

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

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

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SkittlesNTwix
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.

~~~
dogweather
And those are...?

~~~
jlarocco
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/>

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Aloha
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.

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DigitalJack
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...](http://openlibrary.org/works/OL3823216W/Managing_projects_with_Make)

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progrock
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.

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

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

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jasongaya
Good

