Pharo by Example

  • Author: Andrew P. Black ,Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz, Damien Pollet ,Damien Cassou, Marcus Denker
  • Format: Online PDF
  • Price: free

Pharo is a modern open-source development environment and language inspired from Smalltalk. Despite being the first purely object-oriented language and environment, Pharo is in many ways still far ahead of its successors in promoting a vision of an environment where everything is an object, and anything can change at run-time.

Pharo by Example, intended for both students and developers, will guide you gently through the Pharo language and environment by means of a series of examples and exercises.

This book is based on the first release of Pharo. Newer book versions have been released since then.

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Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences

 

  • Author: Andrei Sorin
  • Format: Online PDF
  • Price: free

Addressing general readers as well as software practitioners, “Software and Mind” discusses the fallacies of the mechanistic ideology and the degradation of minds caused by these fallacies. Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a neat hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple structures. Our software-related affairs, in particular, cannot be represented in this fashion. And yet, all programming theories and development systems, and all software applications, attempt to reduce real-world problems to neat structures of data, operations, and features. Ultimately, by restricting ourselves to mechanistic software, we impoverish all aspects of our life that depend on software.

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Data + Design

  • Author: Trina Chiasson, Dyanna Gregory
  • Format: online HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI
  • Price: free

How do you effectively communicate data with design? This book introduces you to the basic concepts behind data research, analysis, and visualization. Whether you’re designing infographics, web forms or admin dashboards, this is a superb read.

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Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, 3rd Edition

  • Author: Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
  • Format: online HTML
  • Price: free

Consistently praised in earlier editions as the best volume on classic elements of web site design, Web Style Guide, now in its Third Edition, continues its tradition of emphasis on fundamentals. Focusing on the needs of web site designers in corporations, government, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions, the book explains established design principles and how they apply in web design projects in which information design, interface design, and efficient search and navigation are of primary concern.

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Designing for the Web

  • Author: Mark Boulton
  • Format: online HTML, epub, mobi, PDF
  • Price: free

You’ll find an abundant amount of web design tips and strategies in this book. It talks about a wide range of subjects: getting your first design job, design research, typography, color, and more.

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The Shape of Design

  • Author: Frank Chimero
  • Format: online HTML, epub, mobi, PDF
  • Price: free

A fieldguide for makers. A love letter to design. If you create things, the book’s insights will inform the way you think about your work, regardless of how you make your living.

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Text Processing in Python

  • Author: David Mertz
  • Format: plain text
  • Price: free

Text Processing in Python describes techniques for manipulation of text using the Python programming language. At the broadest level, text processing is simply taking textual information and doing something with it. This might be restructuring or reformatting it, extracting smaller bits of information from it, or performing calculations that depend on the text. Text processing is arguably what most programmers spend most of their time doing.

Because Python is clear, expressive, and object-oriented it is a perfect language for doing text processing, even better than Perl. As the amount of data everywhere continues to increase, this is more and more of a challenge for programmers.

This book is not a tutorial on Python. It has two other goals: helping the programmer get the job done pragmatically and efficiently; and giving the reader an understanding – both theoretically and conceptually – of why what works works and what doesn’t work doesn’t work. Mertz provides practical pointers and tips that emphasize efficient, flexible, and maintainable approaches to the text processing tasks that working programmers face daily.

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Introduction to Programming using Python

  • Author: Katja Schuerer, Corinne Maufrais, Catherine Letondal, Eric Deveaud, Marie-Agnes Petit
  • Format: PDF
  • Price: free

The objective of this course is to teach programming concepts to biologists. It is thus aimed at people who are not professional computer scientists, but who need a better control of computers for their own research.

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Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

  • Author: Allen B. Downey
  • Format: online HTML, PDF
  • Price: free

Think Python is an introduction to Python programming for beginners. It starts with basic concepts of programming, and is carefully designed to define all terms when they are first used and to develop each new concept in a logical progression. Larger pieces, like recursion and object-oriented programming are divided into a sequence of smaller steps and introduced over the course of several chapters.

Some examples and exercises are based on Swampy, a Python package written by the author to demonstrate aspects of software design, and to give readers a chance to experiment with simple graphics and animation.

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