[FT_intern]

Am I the only one who dislikes these free resource type collections?

One, they present too many choices of dubious value. The most important part of book recommendations is a vetting of a few resources that are guaranteed to be enlightening.

Two, the monetary cost of a book isn't the largest "cost". The largest cost is the time spent reading the book, which again means that the most value that can be added is through the vetting of the contents of the book compared to all other alternatives.

[r3bl]

> The most important part of book recommendations is a vetting of a few resources that are guaranteed to be enlightening.

That's a difficult thing to make since you have to be subjective when suggesting a resource.

For example, in awesome-scifi's novels section[0], we as the maintainers try to tackle this project by requesting from the PR submitter to add a subjective description on why the submitter thinks that the novel in question is awesome (backed up by the name of the submitter so you know exactly who wrote that description), to add a Goodreads rating at the time of submitting a PR, and an emoji if it contains more than 100k ratings on Goodreads (indicating that it's a popular one).

Now, I'm obviously being subjective when talking about a list I'm one of the maintainers of, but when I'm searching for a book, I get to see if it has a good rating, if it got a lot of ratings, and a subjective description of why the person who submitted it thinks it's awesome. It works rather well in my case.

[0] https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-scifi#novels

[prawn]

"Two, the monetary cost of a book isn't the largest "cost"."

Is that going to be true for all people around the world, regardless of income? Sure it's probably true for you or I, but free learning resources are likely to be vital for many others.

[sweetjesus]

I don't think PP worded his point as clearly as he could but I think he meant something more along the lines of "a small list of free books that is vetted for quality is much more valuable than a big list of many more free books that includes duds". There is an intersection between that point and the point you made/and responded to which is, "some books (and therefore vettings) are so valuable they might be worth paying for over a less good free alternative" ... of course weighted for the amount of disposable income a person might have.

[john_reel]

Monetary cost of the book is the only cost for me. For many programming books, reading them cover to cover is a bad idea. You won’t retain information and you might even go against the motivations of the book. I like these ebooks because they’re a reference that works offline. If I have a question about a design pattern, or a bad practice, or about a feature of the language, I can reference the book in seconds. Skimming the book to get a summary of its materials, I can, in under an hour, learn when its material is applicable. Then, if I need it later, I can search it with a simple ctrl-f to build the knowledge.

Programming is a lot of material, but it’s repetitive enough that you have near infinite opportunities to practice it. You don’t need to cram, you just need to practice. For the things that aren’t repetitive but may still come up, there is Google and ctrl-f in your pdf reader of choice.

And I disagree with you about dubious value being a concern. If you’re going to bother using the book, you can bother Googling it to see if it is valuable.

[iamdave]

Is "too many choices" in this context really that valid of a critique when the entire purpose is to "choose what's applicable to your need, ignore what isn't"?

[jacalata]

The full phrase was "too many choices of dubious value"

[caiozo]

That's why I built this website, to moderate and add good free book, to minimize the "dubious value".