Very Humble Beginnings
This site was started by April Russo, as a plain text file containing more than 160 book links, served from a webserver on her old Pentium I personal computer, over a 33.6k dialup connection, back in the summer of 2005. It was for the benefit of students and self-learners that were visitors to a few programming related chat rooms on the WinMX and Ares P2P networks, that were looking for some free books to learn from.
A Website Is Born
One day April spotted an article in the Langalist newsletter about a guy named Jason that started a website called Textbook Revolution, to list freely available educational resources. He was asking for help locating books, and computer technology related ones, in particular.
April emailed Jason and sent him a copy of the list she had compiled. He responded by asking her to post the list on a webpage and he would just link to the page, instead, since it would be too much work to add all the individual books to his site.
That is when this site began, as a very crude, single page website, listing the books by category, with only the title and links, and no additional info about the books.
It made the front page of Digg back November of 2005, and became a popular link shared on social media and bookmarking sites all over the web.
Today and Beyond
Much improved since its early days, this site continues to exist as a resource for those that are in need of educational materials and might not have the budget to pay for them. It would be far better for people to have the information they need for free, than to buy an expensive book and go hungry, put themselves further into debt that they can’t afford, or resort to illegal acts of piracy to continue their education.
There are a number of publishers and authors that feel the same way and have made their books available online for free. Finding them can be quite a difficult task, though. That is why April and her friends continue to search the web looking for these books.
It is the goal of this site to find and list every English language, freely available, programming related, e-book that exists on the web.
You can help with this task.
If you know of a book that is not listed on this site and should be (full books only, no sample chapters), then please contact us and let us know where it is.
And if you are an author that would like your book listed here, by all means, we’d love to hear from you, too. Please submit your book for inclusion.
If you find a dead link listed, please leave a comment on that book’s page and the webmaster will fix it.
We don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.
It is not the purpose of this site to infringe on anyone’s rights. We do not host any of these books nor do we have any control over those hosting them. We are merely listing links that we have found, many from numerous Google searches. We do our best to make sure that all the links are to legal resources only, but we can not know the status of every book that exists.
If you are an author or publisher, and a book of yours is listed here, and it is not your intention to make it freely available, please contact us to let us know that we made a mistake, and the listing will be removed.
Looking for something we don’t have?
If you can’t find what you need on our site, ask your local or school library if they are a member of the EBSCO Net Library program, and if you can get a login to access materials there.
You can actually “borrow” just about anything there! It’s a great program that all libraries should make available to their patrons, and many university libraries, all over the world, already do.
If you live in the US, you might also be able to access resources at Hoopla, for free, using your local public library card number, if they are subscribers to the Hoopla service.
