Programming ebooks available online
There is quite a collection available online (for your chosen language I assume you can assemble more). I assembled this list mostly in the context of learning R - with a particular focus on books that had also been published by O’Reilly.
Besides some Cambridge University Press books (noted as available as alumni benefits to those who went there) otherwise and to the best of my knowledge: these are all made freely available by the author (however the disclaimer applies that these are external sites not under my control - so make your own judgements and use at your own risk).
Books available as O’Reilly publications marked in parentheses (the version linked to is not the O’Reilly publication itself usually but rather the author’s copy of their book - which has been published by O’Reilly). For those new to programming books: an O’Reilly publication is both something of a minimum quality guarantee (involving as it will professional editors) and so ubiquitous that there is a parody O RLY Cover Generator and repository of covers sending up various aspects of programming culture.
Python
- Data Science at the Command Line, 2e (O’Reilly)
- Modeling and Simulation in Python (by Allen B. Downey on Green Tea Press)
- Think Python 2nd edition (O’Reilly) (by Allen B. Downey on Green Tea Press) - y hay una traducción al español aqui (and there’s a Spanish translation). A funny tale from the preface: the Java version was published first under a free license and a high school teacher translated it to a Python version and sent it to the author so in the author’s words “I had the unusual experience of learning Python by reading my own book”!
- Think Stats 2nd edition (O’Reilly) (by Allen B. Downey on Green Tea Press). This is geared to Python.
R programming ebooks
These four have Hadley Wickham of RStudio as author or co-author.
- Advanced R - 2nd Edition
- R Packages (2e) (O’Reilly)
- ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis
- R for Data Science (O’Reilly)
And not featuring Hadley Wickham:
- Data Science in Education Using R (Routledge)
- Efficient R programming (O’Reilly)
- Efficient R programming - less recent alternative link (O’Reilly)
- Hands-On Programming with R (O’Reilly)
- Mastering Spark with R (O’Reilly)
- R Cookbook, 2nd Edition (O’Reilly)
- Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach (O’Reilly)
- R Graphics Cookbook, 2nd edition (O’Reilly)
- R for Data Engineers - A Brief Introduction for People Who Count From Zero
- Inquiry and Analysis in Biology - less programming & more using R in context of scientific enquiry.
- R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
JavaScript
- Learning Patterns covering JavaScript’s ES2015+ syntax (the major language update also known as ES6) a co-author of this, Addy Osmani, is author of the O’Reilly book Learning JavaScript Design Patterns (not freely available online unlike the Learning Patterns book).
Dataviz
- Fundamentals of Data Visualization (O’Reilly)
Machine learning/AI/Automated Statistics
I say “Automated Statistics” as Timothy Niven and Hung-Yu Kao. 2019. Probing Neural Network Comprehension of Natural Language Arguments. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, Florence, Italy, 4658–4664. shows that AI/Machine Learning models are automating sophisticated statistical correlations - not actual intelligence.
Git
- Pro Git - this is the book pointed to and available on the official Git site here.
Java
- Think Java 2nd edition (O’Reilly)
Misc languages
- Programming in Scala 1st Edition (latest is 5th)
- Real World Haskell (O’Reilly)
- Think Julia (O’Reilly)
- Clojure Cookbook (O’Reilly) - this is on Github as a book that one can build into PDF/EPUB/Mobi/HTML.
Classics
- Security Engineering - now in a 3rd edition this is an enormous read by Ross Anderson - the 2nd edition is freely available online (3rd edition should be available online from mid 2024 roughly - until that follow the links to buy from the publisher if you want the 3rd edition).
Historical curiosities (e.g. Subversion)
- Version Control with Subversion (O’Reilly)
Cambridge University Press books available as University of Cambridge alumni benefits
Not freely available like most books on this page - but if one qualifies for University of Cambridge alumni benefits then these might be worth a look.