Net Translations of Dead-Tree IT Classics

slander writes "I have in my shelves a secondhand, bent-folded-stapled-and-mutilated copy of "Numerical Recipies". Thinking I could do better, I googled a little to find Numerical Recipies in the Universal Library. A very neat nerdy resource indeed. Slashdot's attention was drawn by a re-release of MathWorld in Nov 2001. What other dead-tree classics are hiding out there?"

Classics?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what you mean by "classics". Is MathWorld a "classic"? I don't mean that pejoratively -- I tend to think of a "classic" as something old and dusty, and MathWorld has only been around for 6 years or so.

If you're just looking for online books, there are lots of them; e.g., here [andamooka.org] and here [theassayer.org] and here [oreilly.com]. Of course, almost all books for which the copyright has expired are online somewhere -- although very few, if any, IT books would fall into that category.

Classics...

[joto]

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [mit.edu]
• Common Lisp HyperSpec [xanalys.com]
• Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed [cmu.edu]
• Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation [cmu.edu]
• The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed [scheme.com]
• Reflections on trusting trust [acm.org]
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big [naggum.no]
• John McCarthy's homepage [stanford.edu]
• Dennis Ritchie's homepage [bell-labs.com]
• Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to [acm.org]
• Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design) [weblogs.com]
• GTK-Gnome Application Development [gnome.org] (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
• KDE 2.0 Development [andamooka.org] (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
• Eric Weissteins Mathworld [wolfram.com]
• Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ [ru.ac.za] (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
• Parsing techniques - A practical guide [cs.vu.nl]
• Art of assembly language programming [ucr.edu] (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
• Paul Carters 386 assembly book [drpaulcarter.com] (same comment as above)
• An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation [utexas.edu] (see comment above)
• How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing [htdp.org] (not a classic, yet!)
• The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format [gutenberg.org]
• Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions [sacred-texts.com]

Yet another valuable resource . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . that can be pulled at any time at the whim of a publisher. I recommend wget -m soon.

~~~

Don't blindly trust NR

[Anonymous Coward]

Most experts in the field of numerical analysis have a low opinion of Numerical Recipies. Check out this page [nasa.gov].

Re:Don't blindly trust NR

[joto]

Most experts in any other field of programming also have a low opinion of Numerical Recipes. It's quite obvious upon reading it that the authors doesn't exactly value good coding style, good explanations of the algorithms involved, commenting their code, or even using descriptive variable names.

The book is completely unusable for learning numerical analysis, and it's unusable as a recipe source, as the code is copyrighted. Coupled with the fact that actual numerical analysts doesn't like it either, the popularity of the book is quite astonishing... (anyone have any idea why?)