📚 Enlighten
A curated shelf of genuinely good tech books that are legally available to read free online. No paywalls, no sketchy downloads - just authors and publishers doing right by readers.
🧭 Start here: a suggested learning path
New to tech or levelling up? These five, in this order, take you from zero to modern AI.
🤖 Machine Learning & AI
Building systems that learn from data.
Deep Learning
Goodfellow invented GANs; Bengio won the 2018 Turing Award
The theoretical bible of deep learning, written by pioneers of the field. Free HTML edition courtesy of MIT Press.
Dense and mathematical. Treat it as a reference you grow into rather than a first read.
Dive into Deep Learning
Led by Mu Li (creator of Apache MXNet) and Alex Smola of Amazon
An interactive, code-first deep learning textbook with runnable examples in PyTorch, TensorFlow and JAX. Adopted by hundreds of universities worldwide.
Perfect second pass at deep learning: every equation comes with runnable code that makes it finally click
Practical Deep Learning for Coders
Jeremy Howard, former President & Chief Scientist of Kaggle
fast.ai's legendary top-down deep learning course. The full companion book, Deep Learning for Coders with fastai & PyTorch, is free online as runnable Jupyter notebooks.
If you can code but fear the math, start here. By lesson 2 you have deployed a real model - momentum no theory-first book gives you.
Reinforcement Learning - An Introduction
2024 Turing Award winners for founding reinforcement learning
The definitive reinforcement learning text, officially shared free by its authors. The foundations behind everything from AlphaGo to RLHF in ChatGPT.
The clearest thinking on decision-making in computing, gifted to the world free by its Turing-Award-winning authors.
Speech and Language Processing
The standard university NLP text since 2000
The standard NLP textbook, continuously updated by the authors - now covering transformers, pretraining and large language models.
The best free way to understand what is actually inside the LLMs everyone is using.
📊 Data Science
Turning raw data into insight.
An Introduction to Statistical Learning
Hastie & Tibshirani are Stanford statisticians; Tibshirani invented the lasso
The classic gentle introduction to statistical machine learning, offered free in both R and Python editions with labs and datasets.
If machine learning feels like magic, this demystifies it gently. The new Python-edition labs are gold.
Python for Data Analysis
Creator of pandas, co-creator of Apache Arrow
Open-access third edition from the creator of pandas himself. The essential guide to NumPy, pandas, Jupyter and practical data wrangling.
Still the fastest bridge from spreadsheet-brain to pandas-brain. Read it with Jupyter open beside you.
👁️ Computer Vision
Teaching machines to see.
💻 Programming
The craft of writing software.
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
Keeps his books permanently free under Creative Commons
Practical Python for absolute beginners - automate spreadsheets, files, web scraping, emails and other tedious tasks.
The book I would hand any absolute beginner - you are automating real tasks by chapter 3.
Crafting Interpreters
Worked on the Dart language at Google
Build two complete interpreters from scratch and finally understand how programming languages actually work. Beautifully written and illustrated.
A joy from cover to cover. You will never look at a programming language the same way again.
Pro Git
Scott Chacon co-founded GitHub
The official Git book, maintained by the Git project itself, translated into dozens of languages and kept free in every format.
Chapters 3 and 7 alone will fix most Git confusion permanently.
The Linux Command Line
Founder of LinuxCommand.org
The best introduction to the shell, offered free by the author for over a decade. Take full control of your terminal.
Reading this felt like getting terminal superpowers.
💼 IT & Career
Surviving and thriving in the industry.
💡 Suggest a book
Know a great tech book that's legally free online? Send it my way - if it's good, it joins the shelf (with credit to you if you like).