* 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?!):
Conversation
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!
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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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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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@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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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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why's poignant guide to ruby (possibly deleted??)
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This web book is quite lovingly crafted:
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That's a fascinating medium. The "documentation portal." Mainly characterized by nonsequentiality, I think! There's structure, but it's not narrative structure.
Many people writing great stuff in this medium these days—it's lucrative, I guess!
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💯 poignant guide is the best website + best programming guide.
it showed me how you can explain even complex concepts using characters and storytelling, and continues to inspire me to this day. i’m hoping to build a guide as part of an upcoming project following its example
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This reminds me of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good, which I enjoyed very much: learnyouahaskell.com/chapters