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If $100 seems like a meaningless amount of money to you, then nothing I say here will make you understand what it feels like when that's practically an infinite amount of money. I've been on both sides of this and it's pretty hard to understand one side from the point of view of the other.

I hope you'll just take my word for it that $100 is not a meaningless amount of money to most people.

Yeah... As a college student with student loans, rent, utilities, and $30 a week for food, there's not much more room in my budget for books. If I read a medicore free textbook and learn something, that's more than I learned from the $50 textbook that I couldn't buy.

Do you own a smartphone?

A $350 or less smartphone provides more value than three or four $100 textbooks any day.

Depends what do you use smartfone for. Most people use it for facebook and mindless browsing. You can do that less comfortably on cheaper phone.

What? Look at the price of Nexus devices for example. Those things are well powered enough to do anything your flagship can.

Does your university has library?

This is one of the reasons that public libraries are so important. It's still true that textbooks are a good investment even for the very poor - $100 is less than 15 hours at minimum wage, and you'll learn more from 35 hours of studying a good textbook than 50 hours of studying a bad one. But part of the crushing burden of poverty is that it prevents you from making good investments. It doesn't matter how much time that $100 investment will save in the future if there's just no way you can spare the money now. So we as a society should be doing whatever we can to give people access to these resources.

part of the crushing burden of poverty is that it prevents you from making good investments

Exactly.

A car might be a better use of your time than three buses. Too bad. You can only afford the buses.

Some strong work boots would be a better investment than these cheap knock-offs. Too bad. I only have enough money for the knock-offs.

Paying my parking tickets would be a lot smarter than ending up in court. Too. Bad. I don't have $30 to pay them.

An underestimated aspect of this is the fuck it factor. So maybe I get the $30 to pay the tickets? So what? It's just going to be something else tomorrow. So, fuck it; I'm having a beer.

As I understand it, the minimum effective (federal) tax rate is 10%, so it'd be less than 16 hours - not 15?

In addition, it's far from clear to me that price correlates to quality with textbooks. In much the same way as a good junior professor or even grad assistant may actually be a better teacher than a well-known professor.

Being unable to afford the books and software needed to learn programming was actually why I had started contributing to open-source (after I did finally learn).

I had learned just before Linux had started gaining prominence. If it wasn't for a cheap "Learn C++ in 24 hours" book with a free non-commercial copy of Borland C++ 5.02 I'd likely have not been able to really learn programming at all, at least until I later went to college. I'll note that the book itself was essentially useless; it was the .hlp file included with BC++ documenting a subset of the Win32 API that helped me along.

Things are much better now for aspiring (but poor) programmers. But they can be better still, and the cost of learning materials are certainly a key part of that.

It's so easy to forget that your salary is not everybody's salary. In Italy (a first world country afaik) a post doc makes a grand total of about 30 euros per day. An assistant professor probably around 45, which is similar to the entry salary of a software engineer. If you subtract food, housing and transportation, that $100 book starts looking very (very) expensive.

For a large fraction of the world's population time is not money...

Could you please provide some links for Italian salaries, if possible. You made me curious.

Let's not forget a free online book if posted on Hacker News is impossibly slow to access! I am getting 502's.

I am fairly new (3-4) years as a developer and I have gone the free route, still do. But Some of my best books came from early releases @ Oreily using the 50% off sales they almost always have floating around. Typically the free books are older and dated in my experience, but not always. Depends if you have the time to learn and possibly unlearn some things.

Perhaps your response was meant for some other comment. I asked mmf for links that show Italian salaries, I didn't ask for free book links :-)

I was curious too : according to this NYT Op ed [1] " The average salary for an Italian born in the 1980s is about €1,000 a month, or about $1,375" Wolfram tells another story but I suspect the average and median wage are not useful in such a sample.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/opinion/severgnini-italian...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=salary+italy

Wow, where in Italy are you working? In Pisa I made more than that as a PhD student 6 years ago (1k per month).

anecdotally, I work with a lot of Italians and they tell me the salary for developers in Italy is around 2k per month, though that still seems really low for a western country to me.

In Spain, typical entry levels range from 18k€ to 25k€, so about 1200€/month, 14 payments, net of taxes (in Spain, as in other countries, the yearly tax you will pay is estimated and pre-taxed, and at the end of the year recalculated so the difference is adjusted paying more or returning to the contributor)

If we assume the 30 euros a day was an average over the month, not the amount earned each work day, it's not all that different (30*30=900). Within 10% of what you stated at least.

True, but I was more focused on the fact that I earned that sum as a PhD, so one step below the seniority ladder. To earn exactly the same sum as a postdoc is just a crazy thing, and I'm glad I left to do my postdoc in the US.

It's a little presumptuous to assume that everyone who could possibly need access to a technical book has a loose $15 to spare. I know I didn't when I built it, as a 2nd year undergrad not living in a First World economy. The authors who chose to make them free obviously had a wider audience in mind than people who can afford their books. I can, and do, buy books now that I can afford them, but you'd be hard pressed to find a better introduction to Python than Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, a free book.

One of the most life-changing experiences I've ever had came when I decided to not limit myself from buying books/educational materials. See something on you want to learn, the book is $50 on Amazon? I gave myself permission to just buy it and not really feel bad about it.

That can seem expensive - there were times when I would spend $200/month on books and $500 on everything else (food, rent, etc). In the short run it really hurt. In the long run, however, it made a huge difference.

I estimate that my current salary is 3x what it would be had I not done that. I honestly believe I would have been pigeon-holed and trapped in a dead-end industry with little hope for a better future.

Being willing to buy the best books certainly makes sense when you consider how much I was paying for a private college tuition. I ended up dropping out (long story), but if $50 was really going to help me learn enough to be a little more successful, it's totally worth it.

Can you get all of the same information for free? Most likely; the problem is that you end up spending half of your time searching for it. I found that being unwilling to buy books was completely damning to my progress.

(That being said, some of the best education I ever received were things I got for free online - Stanford's CS106A is where I finally started to "get" programming.)

The point is, make sure that spending your own education is at the top of your priority list. That could mean any number of things. I don't want to justify someone going 300k into debt to get a worthless degree, but if there's something you're really passionate about don't let a few bucks hold you back.

This is a good suggestion and also mirrors my own experience with buying books. Once I got myself past the sticker shock (why are all of the books about things I am interested in somehow expensive fucking textbooks?!), it really started giving me an incredibly high return on investment. That being said, I think it's criminally malicious to lock knowledge away behind a paywall. Free is a good start.

I can echo both of your experiences. I'm mostly self taught as a software engineer. I switch to mathematics as a major after my first year in Computer Science. I did take intro to programming classes and other computer science related math courses but never got pass that stuff. Without books I would have huge gaps in my knowledge. But I'm a technical book addict. I've often ended up in some trouble at the end of the month due to buying to many $50+ books. But my career depended on it.

I like the fact that books give a good overview of subjects. Even if you don't remember the little details, at least knowing something exists helps when you look for a solution to a problem. That's the biggest drawback I see whit just trying to learn online from blogs and free books.

But I will say there are a few really good book on that lists. Some that I've paid a lot to get.

  I think it's criminally malicious to
  lock knowledge away behind a paywall.
  Free is a good start.

Fapjacks, you sound very generous with the fruits of other people's labor. I assume you make your housing, transportation, computer hardware, clothing, and other possessions you earned freely available to others--please publish your address so we can take advantage of your largesse. Here in the States, many of the Framers agreed with you regarding intellectual property (I think Jefferson was one.)

I am not that giving. The USA decided to balance the incentive to create against the public interest, so they decided to create a "paywall" in the form of patent and copyright protection (said protection having gone way, way overboard in the last 30 years, IMHO). I support this balance (and yes, I have given away much IP as well as charged for other IP I developed).

I am perfectly willing to support those who work hard enough at something that they are willing to take a chance on the open market by charging for it. No one forces me to buy it, and like Austen Allred, I feel grateful for the opportunity.

Your point is totally invalidated by "ALL THE RESEARCH IS TAXPAYER FUNDED", including corporate R&D in the form of industry subsidies. If I'm paying for it, fuck your "IP".

Austin Allred, this tracks with my experience. I too earn a high integer multiple of what I would have made had I not taken my self-education seriously.

My case may be different from others, because I am self taught at both business and programming. I have always treated professional literature as my "college education", except that unless most CS courses it has always applied directly to my own professional development.

As well as what you said, I give myself permission to study only what's relevant. If I learn just one useful thing from a $50 book there's a very high chance it will pay for the book many, many times over. I do not torture myself by treating every book as if I have some kind of obligation to read it cover to cover.

Ok using a Calculus book as an example was not helpful. They are indeed a commodity. There are dozens of new ones printed every year; they contain the same centuries-old truths in different words. E.g. if you found a really good one, would you throw it away and buy a 'new' one every year? Of course not.

I think a book being free is a good reason to start learning about something. Let's say someone wants to read something about cryptography knowing nothing about it. Paying $100 for a book that he doesn't know if he'll read it thoroughly or if it will be interesting seems a bit of a waste; better take a free book to get a taste of the new field, before buying another one - or donating to the author of the free book.

Having said that, I noticed that the fact of paying for a book makes me more motivated to read it, while I often read couple of pages of the free books before giving up.

You could use those exact same points to argue the opposite conclusion - every book is different, as is every student. Why not try the free ones first to see if you are able to learn from them, before shelling out 100 bucks? If the free one fails you, then go ahead and buy another.

Because time is your most precious commodity.

Economically speaking, that isn't true of everyone, particularly those with low incomes and few immediate work opportunities. Sometimes people are money-poor and time-rich, so it makes sense for them to spend time rather than money on these books. (Presumably with the hope that the skills they acquire can then be used to move into a money-rich industry.)

That's true but then in that case you don't have an option. I think OP's point is when you do have the option of buying a $100 but you think it twice because the high cost. If you can't afford a $100 textbook then you have to go to alternatives (renting, public library, free alternatives, etc.)

The cost of any given book might be "meaningless". It adds up. Imagine spending that $50 a few dozen times, and you've got the beginnings of a decent technical bookshelf - but now we're talking about thousands of dollars, which is a financial obstacle to most people.

> It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free.

For deep study, and assuming you can effectively evaluate other relevant qualities of books before committing to one, sure.

OTOH, the first isn't the only thing technical books are useful for, and the second isn't always true of non-free books.

> I'm saying you should just forget about price altogether and choose based on sampling/reviews/recommendations.

Other than personally-trusted sources that are familiar with the area in question, I find reviews/recommendations to be extremely unreliable, and the decline in brick-and-mortar distribution channels, and the frequently poor sampling options for non-free books (digital or hardcopy) in online retailers make that also poor. Free electronic books thus have a significant advantage in the ability to effectively evaluate quality before making a substantial commitment of money or time.

It's crazy to prefer free technical books just because they're free.

Yes, time is the biggest cost of any book. But there are some massively helpful [0], current [1] and legendary [2] books on this list.

[0] Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw

[1] Street-Fighting Mathematics by Sanjoy Mahajan

[2] Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

Luckily there is a collection of a large number of textbooks (Library Genesis, approx. 1 million) available online, curated in russia originally on dvd's that can be found by anyone determined enough to look. They have books that I needed to wait 2-3 weeks to get at the university library, because they were in storage.

Damn, that will be fantastic for rare and out of print stuff. If I had known when I was in school... Although citing books that aren't in the university library might be problematic.

After reading parts of a free book (or several), one might be much better qualified for buying one 100 dollar book. It's not like expensive books are good and free/cheap ones are bad - as a general rule.

It's not just reading stuff, you should be passionate about the knowledge you would like to acquire. Most of the time people just read and read thinking they will be an expert after just reading a book.

On the other hand, for fundamental subjects like math or CS algorithms/foundations, the difference between the newer and older editions of a text are not always very significant. University textbooks can be pretty egregious in this regard - some authors (who tend to be professors that use their own book for their courses...) just add a new foreword and maybe a new chapter, or slightly rework the homework exercises and release a new edition. So students need to buy the new $100+ edition, instead of getting a used copy at 50% of the price.

For more cutting-edge technologies, it does make sense to buy the latest and greatest. Although if it is something that is rapidly evolving, you may still be better off relying on the current documentation on the web - the lag time involved in writing a book can make it difficult to keep up-to-date as things change.

> I wanted to learn calculus from this very well-recommended book, but it costs $50, so I got this reprint of an older textbook for $15

To be fair, the textbook industry is like a mafia scam, releasing new books in complicity with University courses that then "require" the new edition.

In many cases, the $15 second hand book is just fine.

even if the books cost one cent, I would still prefer them free.