My Favorite Free Resources - Part 1: Books

Books
Music
Video
Software
Education

Ahhh yes, the joy of discovering some cool new  web service or piece of software while browsing through the rss feeds of my google reader...it took a while for me to realize that my room mate is not as eager to have all these awesome discoveries forced onto him during lunch though.  So I thought I would start this blog off by sharing some of my favorite online resources with you instead.

This is the first of a 5 part series exploring my favorite sources for free online books .

http://www.freetechbooks.com/ or http://www.flazx.com/ - Free computer science text books.  On everything from AI to Algorithms to Parallel computing.  They also have most of the common languages if you feel like picking up another language.  I'm in web development, and almost all the books covering php and other web development tools are very current.

http://www.realtimepublishers.com/ - This site is geared specifically toward IT professionals.  They have books on Networking, Security and Network Management.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ - This one is a little different.  If you're tired of the technical books and need to take a break, check out Gutenberg.   They have many of the great classics, including most of the books required for class readings

http://www.paperbackswap.com/ - This is probably one of the favorite free services I've ever signed up for.  It is a free book exchange club that works like this:

1) After signing up, you tell paperback what books you have that you are willing to ship out.

2) Another user will request a book that you've posted and you'll ship to them after which you will recieve 1 credit.

3) You can use this credit to request any book that any other user on the site has posted.

And that's it! You get 2 free credits for signing up, and the only thing you pay is for shipping.  The users are friendly, and fast with shipping, and you can find almost any book you would want.  My favorite feature is the wish list, which allows you to reserve a book and request it as soon as someone else posts it.

http://books.google.com/ - Probably the largest archive of online books and magazines.  I don't think they need much explaining.

Finally, I just want to say that all these resources are great, but I still use my public and school library 80% of the time. so don't forget about that.  So that's it, next time I will be sharing my best free (legal) music sources.  If you have any other gems I haven't discovered yet, please share in the comments,