Jackson I/O

NOTICE

This page is horribly out of date and probably won't be updated.

I originally was very impressed when I found a few books published online so I made this page to show links to all I found. But technology kept advancing and now I download EPUB books to my Sony Reader.

Books Published Online

This is a list of links to some books which have been published online and may be accessed for free. Most of them have also been published in print and are being sold.

There is no substitute for the readability and convenience of a printed book, so the paper copy is well worth its cost. But an online copy for searching and remote access adds great convenience and value, especially for technical subjects. These authors and publishers are commended for their kindness in providing these online versions. It is my hope that sales flourish so others are encouraged to provide online versions.

Software

Using Samba, 2nd Edition: Samba is the software that allows GNU/Linux PCs to interact with Microsoft Windows® PCs. This book is a comprehensive guide to Samba administration and network principles.
Authors: Jay Ts, Robert Eckstein, and David Collier-Brown
Print publisher: O'Reilly & Associates
Grokking the Gimp: The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. This book is not about tips and tricks, or a collection of recipes. It is first about understanding image manipulation concepts, second about knowing which GIMP tools are most effective, and third about the savvy use of these tools.
Author: Carey Bunks
Print publisher: Sams Publishing
RPM Guide: The RPM Package Manager (recursive acronym RPM) is one of several package managers used by GNU/Linux distributions to track and manipulate the applications installed on the system. This book is all about it--how to use it, manage a system with it, and also develop software distributions with it.
Author: Eric Foster-Johnson
Print Publisher: Red Hat Press
The Book of Webmin: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX: Webmin is a web-based graphical UNIX system administration tool designed to be lightweight, functional, and easily extensible. It is portable, and easily extended to support new features due to an open and well documented API. A real effort has been made to provide both a solid introduction to many important tasks, and a nearly comprehensive reference to a typical UNIX server and its parts.
Author: Joe Cooper
Print publisher: No Starch Press
Guide to IP Layer Network Administration with Linux: This guide provides an overview of many of the tools available for IP network administration of the linux operating system. It covers Ethernet, ARP, IP routing, NAT, and other topics.
Author: Martin A. Brown
Print publisher: (apparently not published)

Software Development

Dive Into Python: Dive Into Python is a book about the Python programming language for experienced programmers.
Author: Mark Pilgrim
Print publisher: Apress
The Subversion Book: Subversion is a new powerful, usable, and flexible version control system designed to be the successor to CVS. It is an open-source system with a "look and feel" similar to CVS, that attempts to fix most of CVS's flaws. This book is for people who want to use Subversion to manage their data.
Authors: Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick & C. Michael Pilato
Print publisher: O'Reilly Media
The CVS Book: This book is about using CVS (Concurrent Versions System) for collaboration and version control. It covers everything from CVS installation and basic concepts all the way to advanced usage and administration. It is intended for anyone who uses or plans to use CVS.
Authors: Karl Fogel and Moshe Bar
Print publisher: The Coriolis Group
Undocumented Windows 2000 Secrets: A Programmers Cookbook: This book reveals undocumented secret functions and features of the Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 systems, showing what they are for and how to use them.
This is the full PDF text of this now out-of-print book that Amazon.com sells for $100 used.
Author: Sven Schreiber
Print publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: This book is a tutorial for the GNU Autotools: Autoconf, Automake and Libtool, and a guide that describes how these tools work together.
Authors: Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor
Print publisher: Sams Publishing
Programming in Lua: This book is about the Lua, a simple, efficient, extensible, portable, and free scripting language which is growing in popularity. The author, the chief architect of the language, explains the language and gives examples of use. Additional resources, including the companion reference manual are also available online at lua.org.
Author: Roberto Ierusalimschy
Print publisher: Roberto Ierusalimschy
The C Book, second edition: Published in 1991, this text book on the C programming language obviously does not incorporate the changes made to the language by the 1999 ANSI standard. But it may still be helpful to those learning C, and is valuable as a historical reference.
Authors: Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran
Print publisher: Addison Wesley (1991)
Implementing CIFS: This book is a technical guide to the Common Internet File System (CIFS) for developers who want to add CIFS compatibility to their products. CIFS is Microsoft's network file sharing protocol, based on the SMB protocol at the core of Microsoft operating systems.
Author: Christopher R. Hertel
Print publisher: Prentice-Hall

DocBook Document Format

DocBook is a collection of standards and tools for technical publishing. Text that is marked up in this standard way can be processed by many software tools available from many sources--a major advantage of DocBook over proprietary formats.

DocBook: The Definitive Guide: This book is the official documentation for the DocBook DTD, designed to be the clear, concise, normative reference. It describes how to write and publish DocBook documents and related topics.
Author: Norman Walsh and Leonard Muellner
Print publisher: O'Reilly Media
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide (3rd Edition): Another advantage of DocBook is the set of free Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) stylesheets that are available which enable anyone to publish DocBook content in print and HTML. The stylesheets are actively developed and maintained as an open-source project on SourceForge. This book is a guide for people who want to publish DocBook XML files using the DocBook XSL stylesheets.
Author: Bob Stayton
Print publisher: Sagehill Enterprises

Engineering

The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing: Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is the science of using computers to understand and process signals in countless applications. This is an engineering text book about DSP.
Author: Steven W. Smith
Print publisher: California Technical Publishing

Business / Philosophy / General Technology

Producing Open Source Software: This book is about the human side of open source development. It describes how successful projects operate, the expectations of users and developers, and the culture of free software.
Author: Karl Fogel
Print publisher: O'Reilly Media.
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual: This book has seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. It is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce.
Authors: Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger
Print publisher: Perseus Books Group
Free Software for Busy People: This book works through a series of examples from using OpenOffice.org to creating a website to demonstrate the usefulness and wide applicability of free software. These examples are based around the needs of 6 people who all adopt free software.
Author: Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Print publisher: Idiopathic Publishing

Dictionaries

Merriam-Webster OnLine: This site includes a free dictionary plus premium (pay) services including Encyclopedia Britannica.
OneLook® Dictionary Search: Enter a word to search for multiple dictionary web sites that include that word.
Enter a pattern consisting of letters and wildcards to search for words.
Valid wildcards are * (matches multiple letters) and ? (matches one letter).

Enter word or phrase:

Other Sources of Online Books

These are other lists of links to online books and information.

O'Reilly Open Books: This is a list of books published by O'Reilly that are available online. Many of them are out of print, so if you can't find a used copy, this is the only way you can read them. Others are still in print and for sale, but are published with a dual license.
Sams Reference Library: This site has 15 more online books that could be added to the list above. Here are the titles:
Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office 2003 in 24 Hours (2003),
Mac OS X Unleashed (2001),
Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed (2000),
Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional in 10 Minutes (2000),
Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 Hours (2002),
Sams Teach Yourself C# in 24 Hours (2002),
Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours (2003),
Sams Teach Yourself .Net in 21 Days (2003),
Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours (2002),
Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft SQL Server 7 in 21 Days (1998),
Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours (1999),
Visual C++ 6 Unleashed (2000),
Sams Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours (1999),
Sams Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours (2002),
Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days (2003)
Free books at GNU.org: This is a list of links to online books by various publishers.
Linux.org online books: Here are 28 online books about Linux, free software, open source or related topics.
Linux-Books.us: Here are a bunch of downloadable books specifically about Linux.
Bartleby.com: Online searchable reference books including these and more:
Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition,
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus,
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations,
Strunk's Elements of Style,
World Factbook.
WorldWideSchool: Here is the text of 2129 books, stories, and papers online.
Project Gutenburg: Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. One third of a million books (that's 333,333!) are currently available online in plain ASCII format.
free-books.58search.com: This is another very large list of links to online books in 30 major categories including: Biographies & Memoirs, Business & Investing, Cooking, Food & Wine, Engineering, Law, Medicine, Science, and Travel. (May be offline.)
Open-Access Text Archive: This seems to be a super archive containing 8 archives, including some of the ones here.
OpenCourseWare Finder: This is not a list of books, but a list of free online courses from several universities.
ClassicAuthors.net: Here are the text of works by over 130 authors including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Stephan Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Milton, Plato, Plutarch, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells and Walt Whitman.