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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(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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@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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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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I think it did!!