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Technical Audio Books - Where Are The Good Ones?

Posted by Cliff on Thu Jul 07, 2005 06:45 PM
from the stuff-to-listen-to dept.
Books Education Media
Gverig asks: "Are any good audio (CD) books for developers, engineers or just geeks. These can be lectures on programming concepts, introductions to systems, best practices, ethics, or even funny stories ala Dilbert. What audio books do you have that help you sharpen your technical skills and improve yourself as a professional?"
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Technical Audio Books - Where Are The Good Ones? 37 Comments More /

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    • He never said he wanted the books to be free.
    • Hmm, thank you kindly for the reply. No wonder you postend it anonymously. I never said that I want those books free and the problem is not in that I can't find something. I can. But I can find too much with very mixed feedback over helpfulness of one or the other book that's why I wanted to ask Slashdot. If your remark was just about books being audio and not paperback, I spend a lot of time not being able to read and audio books seem like a nice solution.

  • Audio Books Online (Score:4, Informative)

    by NaNO2x (856759) on Thursday July 07 2005, @06:58PM (#13009504)
    Well for some legal audio books that you can download, I have found http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/ [audiobooksforfree.com] which isn't the best but it does have some good stuff, I would love to know any other good free audiobook sites. But If you want to then there are always torrents for audiobooks. I'm sure there are many things out there and hopefully most of the good stuff is free.
  • BOFH stories read by a text-to-speech program.
    • With regards to a text-to-speech program, I'd recommend TextAloud [textaloud.com], which converts text files to MP3s.

      Way back, I converted Schwartz's 'Learning Perl' (the llama book by O'Reilly press) to an mp3 and used it while working out -- it's quite convenient, but I ended up scrapping it later on, just because I learn quicker when I'm actually at a computer to test commands.

      Also, after trying audiobooks, it's easier to just use normal books when studying, since it's easy to flip to the glossary/index to get syntax

  • University of Washington's presentations (Score:5, Informative)

    by Will Sargent (2751) on Thursday July 07 2005, @07:13PM (#13009637) Homepage
    My biggest technical find (although video rather than audio) has to be the University of Washington's CSE Colloquia. These are videos of presentations done in the University, and they are pure content gold. Given by people who know exactly what they're doing, and a focus on real technical complexity rather than hype.

    http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayseries.asp?col lid=485 [uwtv.org]

  • Quantum Mechanics on Tape! (Score:5, Funny)

    by GuyMannDude (574364) on Thursday July 07 2005, @07:25PM (#13009718) Journal

    I've been trying to save time by learning Quantum during my daily commute. It's tough going:

    "The time-dependent one-dimensional Schrödinger equation is given by i hbar partial psi over partial t equals minus h squared over 2 m times partial squared psi over partial x squared plus V of x times psi of x and t where i is the imaginary unit, psi is the time-dependent wavefunction, and V(x) is the potential. However, the equation can be separated into temporal and spatial parts using separation of variables to obtain..."

    Yeah, that drive is extra-special fun now.

    GMD

    • Re:Quantum Mechanics on Tape! (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hey, if that's the same one that is narrated by Jared from those Subway ads, I've been listening to it too! Did you catch the goof in equation fourty-seven b about 27 minutes into the second side? I swear he says that theta is the eigenfuction when a minute earlier he was using zeta!
      • It was a special case where the eigenvalues mapped to the zeta-function. You obviously weren't listenting to corollary to the normalised recapitulation of equation 33 b (ii) ... duh!

        Damn, if only I hadn't fallen asleep at the wheel I'd be building quantum computers by now instead of being dead.

        Oh well.

        That's QM for you!?!

    • Sorry Officer, I cannot tell you exactly how fast I was going...

  • IT Conversations (Score:4, Informative)

    by FLEB (312391) on Thursday July 07 2005, @07:51PM (#13009887) Homepage Journal
    http://www.itconversations.com/ [itconversations.com] is about the best I've found along these lines.

    Keep an eye on Podcasts. Most of the technical shows I've found on there are just a gloss-over, but something good has to come around sooner or later.
  • The local library system has a lot of books on tape or books on CD available for borrowing (both fiction and non-fiction).

  • Not as effective... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by palndrumm (416336) on Thursday July 07 2005, @08:40PM (#13010143) Homepage
    Audio books aren't anywhere near as effective for technical books as for other genres. The main trouble with converting technical books to audio is that they often use diagrams and tables to explain and illustrate things, which is kinda hard to do with an audio book.

  • Podcast.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by SteveX (5640) on Thursday July 07 2005, @08:41PM (#13010147) Homepage
    It's not a book, but it's a fairly technical podcast, something there don't seem to be a lot of. Geared to developers.

    http://www.codesermon.org/ [codesermon.org]

  • Podcasts (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noksagt (69097) on Thursday July 07 2005, @08:52PM (#13010209) Homepage
    As others have mentioned, Podcasts are the way to go. Here are good ones:
    • IT Conversations [itconversations.com] has IT-related conferences, interviews, round-tables, and more.
    • Science Friday [sciencefriday.com] is the weekly NPR segment, with science interviews, news, and discussion.
    • This Week in Science [twis.org] is college radio at it's finest. Informative and funny.
    There are, of course, many other programs I haven't been able to listen to yet. Learn of others at ipodder.org or the various other podcast directories that have sprung up.

  • Feynman Lectures. All of them. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noksagt (69097) on Thursday July 07 2005, @09:12PM (#13010335) Homepage
    Hopefully most geeks know of the late, great physicist, Richard Feynman. In addition to coming up with QED, helping to make the A-bomb, winning a nobel prize, and figuring out why the Challenger blew-up, he gave lectures to college freshmen on physics. They're great. The books are often suggested texts, but it is a treat to hear them in his voice. I bought mine on audio-tape and pain-stakingly recorded them on my PC to dump onto CDs. Thankfully, official CDs have started to trickle out.

    Vol 1-2 [amazon.com] are on Quantum Mechanics. 3-4 [amazon.com] covers crystal structure, electricity, and magnetism. 5-6 goes through energy, motion, kinetics, and heat. 7-8 [amazon.com] does classical and relativistic mechanics (and gravity and a bit more electromagnetism). More should be coming. I think they are up to volume 20 of the tape sets. Each volume has about six chapters from the books. I think there are 129 chapters all-told.
    • When I got my "new" car with a CD player, I ran out and bought "Six Not So Easy Pieces." Sadly, I discovered that the car's CD player didn't work. So, I put it on my iPod, and listen with headphones when I drive/eat/whatever. It's great.

      One problem is that Feynman often says, "As you can see on this diagram..." and then you hear chalk on a blackboard for a bit. I can usually fugure out roughly what he drew, but I think that something like this would actually be perfect as a slide show on the iPod photo

  • even funny stories ala Dilbert.

    Scott Adams actually does have a lot of audiobooks. The Dilbert Boxed Gift Set [amazon.com] contains The Dilbert Principle [amazon.com], Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook [amazon.com], and The Dilbert Future [amazon.com].

    Since those, he's come out with Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel [amazon.com] and The Joy of Work [amazon.com].

  • Podcasts (Score:3, Informative)

    by eyeball (17206) on Friday July 08 2005, @02:06AM (#13011633) Homepage Journal
    There are a few development Podcasts emerging. One includes my favorite on Java called zdot [timshadel.com]

    Someone else already mentioned , but it's worth recommending again. [itconversations.com]

  • In addition to those already mentioned, I'd add The Teaching Company at teach12.com [teach12.com], which produces some of the best, most informative spoken word out there.

    Alex.

  • Guido van Rossum on Python (Score:3, Informative)

    by rjnagle (122374) on Friday July 08 2005, @09:24AM (#13013236) Homepage
    ITCoversations.com is the obvious answer to your question.

    I just listened to 2 talks by Guido van Rossum about python
    See here [itconversations.com] and here [itconversations.com].

    Believe it or not, I heard part of it while shopping at Walmart.

    Truthfully though, aside from journalistic coverage of new technology, it's very difficult to present technical information via audio (though not impossible).

    Actually, I'm a little surprised that The Teaching Company (the company that produces those college classes on tape) haven't tried any technical classes.
  • http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com/ [simplyaudiobooks.com] has a lot of the sci fi classics and some business books that I find useful. Not so much technical stuff, but I mostly prefer to look at that stuff anyway.

  • "Here is some sample code. char asterick foo equals new char open bracket three zero close bracket semicolon."

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