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There are surprisingly few serious "web books"! I don't even mean "fancy new media books"—just: written primarily for and read primarily on the web.
Collecting some favorites. Please reply with yours!
* Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com
(more
)
Collecting some favorites. Please reply with yours!
* Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com
(more
)
* Neural Networks and Deep Learning: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com
* How to Design Programs (2nd ed): https://htdp.org
* Circles, Sines, and Signals: https://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/
* Meaningless (is it a book?!): https://meaningness.com
* How to Design Programs (2nd ed): https://htdp.org
* Circles, Sines, and Signals: https://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/
* Meaningless (is it a book?!): https://meaningness.com
Then there's the class of "web serializations"—books which started as a series of blog posts, or online fan fiction chapters, which were later serialized into "real" books. Those often lose something in book form, since they weren't "designed in one piece," lack a coherent whole.
Why aren't there more? Well, if you *want* to write a web-first book—again, not even a fancy new-media thing, just a book whose text is online—there's no quick consumer-grade solution. Spin up Ghost and write some HTML, I guess. Or elaborately theme a Wordpress?
Then there's the monetization problem. Lots of people have web sites which vend a PDF, but that's different.
More fundamentally, maybe one barrier is just that reading long-form texts—especially book-length texts—on screens is pretty miserable! https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Reading_texts_on_computers_is_unpleasant
More fundamentally, maybe one barrier is just that reading long-form texts—especially book-length texts—on screens is pretty miserable! https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Reading_texts_on_computers_is_unpleasant
https://twitter.com/mdiep/status/1246941499734085632
(Aside: Why so much programming material? It’s a striking sign that publishing a web book still has significant technical barriers)
(Aside: Why so much programming material? It’s a striking sign that publishing a web book still has significant technical barriers)
These guides look awfully polished (haven’t read any yet myself!): https://twitter.com/fadeke_adegbuyi/status/1246941902869426176
I didn’t know that this lovingly crafted and very personal book on the philosophy of design was available as a web book: https://twitter.com/zindlurb/status/1246941939699568642
Highly recommended on both counts: https://twitter.com/litonico_/status/1246943012254408706
This is the true winning answer. This book was *so important* to me growing up. Reading it was the first time I realized that programming didn’t have to be utilitarian; it could be expressive. It’s dead but archived here: https://poignant.guide https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/1246946406608310273
This web book is quite lovingly crafted: https://resilientwebdesign.com
