There are surprisingly few serious "web books"! I don't even mean "fancy new media books"—just: written primarily for and read primarily on the web.
Collecting some favorites. Please reply with yours!
* Butterick's Practical Typography: practicaltypography.com
(more 👇)
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* Neural Networks and Deep Learning: neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com
* How to Design Programs (2nd ed): htdp.org
* Circles, Sines, and Signals: jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-
* Meaningless (is it a book?!):
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Then there's the class of "web serializations"—books which started as a series of blog posts, or online fan fiction chapters, which were later serialized into "real" books. Those often lose something in book form, since they weren't "designed in one piece," lack a coherent whole.
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Why aren't there more? Well, if you *want* to write a web-first book—again, not even a fancy new-media thing, just a book whose text is online—there's no quick consumer-grade solution. Spin up Ghost and write some HTML, I guess. Or elaborately theme a Wordpress?
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Then there's the monetization problem. Lots of people have web sites which vend a PDF, but that's different.
More fundamentally, maybe one barrier is just that reading long-form texts—especially book-length texts—on screens is pretty miserable!
twitter.com/mdiep/status/1
(Aside: Why so much programming material? It’s a striking sign that publishing a web book still has significant technical barriers)
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
Programming Language Foundations in Agda
plfa.github.io
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These guides look awfully polished (haven’t read any yet myself!):
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
@holloway's guides are exactly this!
holloway.com
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I didn’t know that this lovingly crafted and very personal book on the philosophy of design was available as a web book:
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
shapeofdesignbook.com
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Highly recommended on both counts:
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@munificentbob's very good books: Crafting Interpreters (craftinginterpreters.com) and Game Programming Patterns (gameprogrammingpatterns.com)
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This is the true winning answer. This book was *so important* to me growing up. Reading it was the first time I realized that programming didn’t have to be utilitarian; it could be expressive. It’s dead but archived here: poignant.guide
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
why's poignant guide to ruby (possibly deleted??)
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This web book is quite lovingly crafted:
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Replying to
I thought about this a lot whilst working as a bookseller and teaching myself webdev. I kept coming up with ideas, only to realise they'd been done in one form or another.
✅ Hyperlink CYOA
✅ Video cut screens
✅ Dynamic backgrounds
Etc etc...
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...and the problem with trying to define a "web book" beyond saying "a book readable on the internet" is that you inevitably exclude a bunch of potential techniques by omission.
Depends on the story, and the audience.
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