Dear caoxinh,
Ebooks for leisure reading are readily available from such outlets as
Amazon, Fictionwise, and Project Gutenberg, but books on IT are less
widely publicized for the time being. This is a shame, since technical
material seems much more likely to be read and referred to on a computer
than entertainment titles.
There are, however, several reputable sources of fine eBooks on IT
subjects. Most of these eBooks are, of course, electronic versions of
conventionally printed matter, which ensures a wide range of titles. Most
of the sources, in turn, are connected with O'Reilly, the preeminent
publisher of IT manuals and tutorials. The best source of them all, the
Safari Bookshelf, is an O'Reilly property, although it carries titles
from all the major IT book vendors.
Let me start by directing you to some free eBooks on IT subjects. There
is, first of all, a wide variety of articles and reference guides
available for free on the InformIT website. Some of the articles are
quite long and detailed, amounting to thorough primers in their topic. I
have found the programming articles especially pleasing. The articles
and guides are published online in HTML format for convenient browsing,
but they also have a Print option that renders them in a sleek one-page
format for printing to hard copy, rendering as a PostScript file, or
saving directly to your hard disk in HTML.
InformIT: Chapters and Articles
http://informit.com/articles/index.asp
InformIT: Reference Guides
http://informit.com/guides/index.asp
The next source you should consider is the Open Books Project by
O'Reilly. This is a collection of IT books, some of them very good,
that were either released under open licenses in the first place or
that, once published conventionally, were subsequently liberated from
copyright constraints.
In many cases, the copyright was annulled because the books fell out of
print, but this doesn't mean that their content is obsolete. Rather,
a number of the books no longer made a good commercial proposition,
or fell by the wayside as another author's work on the subject became
more popular. Some of these out-of-print books are fine works that I
am glad to see free and online. For example, the first edition of CGI
Programming on the World Wide Web is free, as are the Java AWT Reference
and Web Client Programming with Perl.
O'Reilly: Open Books Project
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/
The shorter books by O'Reilly, in particular the Pocket References,
can be downloaded for a price in the form of PDF documents. Although
the PDF versions of the JavaScript Pocket Reference and the CSS Pocket
Reference are no cheaper than the bookstore versions, you don't have to
go the bookstore to procure them. Having the PDF version on your hard
disk also means that you don't have to worry about losing the book --
although you should back up the file on a second hard disk -- and that
you can print multiple copies of the book. This lets you pay once, but
end up with a copy at work, another at home, one for the commuter train,
and so on.
O'Reilly Digital Publications: eDocuments
http://edocuments.oreilly.com/
Finally, the mother lode of digitally published eBooks is Safari. This
is not just a source of eBooks, it is the source of an eBook version
of almost every book printed by the major IT publishers. The nearly
complete works of O'Reilly, Sams, Que, New Riders, Peachpit Press,
Addison Wesley, and others are available in their entirety on Safari in
HTML format. Any computer with an Internet connection and a web browser
will let you avail yourself of Safari titles for a fee.
In most cases, however, you may not print copies of the book. This is
because the volumes sold digitally on Safari are expensive and popular
titles that make enticing prey for content pirates. It is still possible
to extract the contents of each book through the HTML interface, but much
harder. In any case, I don't view it as a significant inconvenience that
one is restricted to reading these eBooks through a web browser. I do
most of my reading on the computer monitor anyway, and I prefer browsing
HTML to flipping through a PDF document.
Safari (ProQuest Information and Learning)
http://safari.oreilly.com/
I am confident that you will find any title you require on Safari. If
you are a casual reader of eBooks who has no specific requirements but
a general thirst for IT knowledge, the free and cheap resources I have
mentioned earlier will likely suit your fancy.
I have enjoyed addressing this matter on your behalf. If you find fault
with my answer, please let me know through a Clarification Request so
that I may fully meet your needs before you assign a rating.
Regards,
leapinglizard |
