Annals of the Homestarmy - Month of Free (Online) Books

Day 18: Prof. Lessig

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Sun, 18 May 2008 07:04:00 -0600

[Ed: Even though the project was a failure, I had already written a few, and just left them around to publish at the appropriate time]

Today, we'll focus on Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society Lessig is the author of "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and an expert on the issues of copyright and "copyleft. His lecture is here, and three of his books:

The Future of Ideas
Free Culture
Code Version 2.0

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:53:59 -0600

So, I know I promised to stop flooding the front page with links to books, but I had to do one last one because it's only available for free download until the 13th - STAR WARS: LEGACY OF THE FORCE: BETRAYAL.

Blurb from the page:
Have you ever wondered what happened to Han, Luke and Leia after the events of Return of the Jedi?

Now, in BETRAYAL, the legacy that began with Anakin Skywalker has finally come full circle. Join Han, Luke, Leia, and the other heroes of the New Jedi Order in their epic struggle to maintain peace in the galaxy, as a new threat rises from the most unexpected of places.

Day 11: Another Sunday Special

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:17:00 -0600

This week's video lecture is from Brewster Kahle, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, and originator of the print-on-demand Bookmobile. Therefore, it seems only appropriate to link to two books available in the Internet Archive.

First, there's Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming.

Secondly, how about Richard F. Burton's "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1" (sometimes called "1,001 Arabian Nights")

08: To Please our Robot Overlords

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:03:57 -0600

Did I say "Overlords"? I meant Protectors.

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, one of the texts you'll need if you want to take the Utah State University "Open CourseWare" course ECE7680 - Information Theory.

Thicker than Blood which includes, starting on page 4, a ChangeLog of the revisions the book has gone through, starting with version 0.21...I wonder what happened to the revision notes prior to that.

Day 07: Paranoia

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:42:00 -0600

Intrusion Detection with SNORT: Advanced IDS Techniques Using SNORT, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and ACID, part of the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series.

Also, the fine folks at Project Gutenberg bring us Moby Dick.

Day 06: Not Feeling Quippy Today

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:20:59 -0600

Yeah, I've got nothing clever for you today.

Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns is an interesting book - if you look at the left-hand side, you'll notice that the author is attempting to adapt the body of the text to multiple programming languages, including such surprising choices as Lua, Perl, and PHP.

On the fiction front, we have John Sundman's novel, "Acts of the Apostles", described as a "techno-thriller novel".

Day 05: In a Hurry

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:39:22 -0600

I'm still in the middle of upgrading some stuff on the server (sorry for the outage, BTW), so no fanfare today, just the links:

Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash
1632 by Eric Flint - I don't normally go in for "historical fiction", especially not this sort, but I REALLY enjoyed this book (as well as the others in the series, which you can expect to find in future posts)

Day 04: Sunday Special!

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Mon, 05 May 2008 01:02:00 -0600

Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar was a VERY key book in the formation of my interest in programming in general, and open source in specific...but the theory expressed there wouldn't have gotten me very far if it hadn't been for the implementation, in the form of the Debian Linux distribution, and the excellent book Learning Debian GNU/Linux.

And what's so special about Sunday, you ask?

I addition to the books of the day, Sundays will feature a link to one of a series of videos published by C-SPAN, in association with the US Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, on "The Library in the Digital Context". The first lecture features David Weinberger, one of the best known experts on "blogging" and coauthor of the bestselling book, "The Cluetrain Manifesto".

Day 03: O'Reilly and Associates, Part I

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Sat, 03 May 2008 09:00:00 -0600

I just realized that I should have been more clear in the initial post - "recreational" is defined as books I would read recreationally

Such as the excellent book from O'Reilly and Associates titled Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

Personally, I was sad to see ORA's series on X11 go out of print, as there's still a lot to be said for the X11 framework/protocol, even though most people want to target Qt or the GNOME libraries instead. So I was happy to see they put them out under an "open book" license. You can find volume one of this collection on archive.org.

Day 02: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom / Programming from the Ground Up

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:00:00 -0600

[Ed: Typo'd Cory's last name - thanks, Johnny]

My very first experience with the writings of Cory Doctorow came from his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

And, as long as we're on "firsts", how about Programming from the Ground Up, a book on writing assembly for Linux?

New Category, and an Experiment

nospam@example.com (Ancient of Days) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:28:41 -0600

My goal is to post a new article every day for the entire month of May linking to at least two books that can be read for free online - one technical, one recreational.

For the initial post, I've chosen two that everyone should read:

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (colloquially known as "the SICP")
and
the latest (2007) draft of Autonomy: Freedom of Thought, which is a bit rough in places but has some fun ideas