Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs
This anthology of Steve Jobs interviews, announcements and emails is available to read for free as a nicely typeset web book.
Link tags: webbook
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Web UI Engineering Book - toheeb.com
I like the way this work-in-progress is organised—it’s both a book and a personal website that’ll grow over time.
Color and Contrast.com
A lovely website (or web book?) dedicated entirely to colour contrast, complete with interactive illustrative widgets.
A comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast.
Demystifying Public Speaking by Lara Callender Hogan
Lara’s superb book on public speaking is now available in its entirity for free as a web book!
And a very beautiful web book it is too! All it needs is a service worker so it works offline.
Letters to a Young Technologist
A handsome web book that’s a collection of thoughtful articles on technology, culture, and society by Jasmine Wang, Saffron Huang, and other young technologists:
Letters to a Young Technologist is a collection of essays addressed to young technologists, written by a group of young technologists.
Web Browser Engineering
It’s heavy on computer science, but this is a fascinating endeavour. It’s a work-in-progress book that not only describes how browsers work, but invites you to code along too. At the end, you get a minimum viable web browser (and more knowledge than you ever wanted about how browsers work).
As a black box, the browser is either magical or frustrating (depending on whether it is working correctly or not!). But that also make a browser a pretty unusual piece of software, with unique challenges, interesting algorithms, and clever optimizations. Browsers are worth studying for the pure pleasure of it.
See how the sausage is made and make your own sausage!
This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a thousand lines of Python.
Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer
A Creative Commons licensed web book that you can read online.
Carbon dioxide removal at a climate-significant scale is one of the most complex endeavors we can imagine, interlocking technologies, social systems, economies, transportation systems, agricultural systems, and, of course, the political economy required to fund it. This primer aims to lower the learning curve for action by putting as many facts as possible in the hands of the people who will take on this challenge. This book can eliminate much uncertainty and fear, and, we hope, speed the process of getting real solutions into the field.
Why Do We Interface?
A short web book on the past, present and future of interfaces, written in a snappy, chatty style.
From oral communication and storytelling 500,000 years ago to virtual reality today, the purpose of information interfaces has always been to communicate more quickly, more deeply, to foster relationships, to explore, to measure, to learn, to build knowledge, to entertain, and to create.
We interface precisely because we are human. Because we are intelligent, because we are social, because we are inquisitive and creative.
We design our interfaces and they in turn redefine what it means to be human.
Гибкий веб-дизайн
Well, this is just wonderful! Students from Moscow Coding School are translating Resilient Web Design into Russian. Three chapters done so far!
This is literally the reason why I licensed the book with a Creative Commons Attribution‐ShareAlike license.
A Scandal in Bohemia
Well, this is rather lovely! The Paravel gang have made an atmospheric web book out of a Sherlock Holmes story (yay for the public domain!).
Modest JS Works | You were never sold on heavy-handed JavaScript approaches. Here’s a case for keeping your JS modest.
The fat JavaScript stacks-du-jour have a lot of appeal. They promise you to be able to do more with less. But what if I want to do less?
This is a terrific little (free!) online book all about modest JavaScript. The second part has practical code, but it’s the first part—all about the principles of staying lean—that really resonates with me.
Don’t build more JS than you can maintain over the long term. If you’re going to be building something for a long time, make sure what you are building will grow with you. Make sure you don’t depend on other people’s work too much, lest you want to keep refactoring your code when the framework you picked goes out of style.
The Book | The Lean Web
This is such a great little web book from Chris Ferdinandi that you can read online for free.
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
A short, snappy web book on product development from Ryan Singer at Basecamp.
Like Resilient Web Design, the whole thing is online for free (really free, not “give us your email address” free).
The Elements of Content Strategy — A Book Apart
Erin’s classic book is now available to read online for free!
Idiosyncrancies of the HTML parser - The HTML Parser Book
This might just be the most nerdily specific book I’ve read and enjoyed. Even if you’re not planning to build a web browser any time soon, it’s kind of fascinating to see how HTML is parsed—and how much of an achievement the HTML spec is, for specifying consistent error-handling, if nothing else.
The last few chapters are still in progress, but you can read the whole thing online or buy an ePub version.
A Briefer History of Time
You can read all of Stephen Hawking’s 2008 book online as a web book (kind of like Resilient Web Design).
Robust Client-Side JavaScript – A Developer’s Guide · molily
This is a terrific resource on writing client-side JavaScript without making too many assumptions.
It starts by covering some of the same topics as Resilient Web Design—fault tolerance, Postel’s law, progressive enhancement—but then goes deep, deep, deep into the specifics of applying that to JavaScript.
And the whole thing is available here for free under a Creative Commons licence!
Design Systems Handbook - DesignBetter.Co
A weirdly over-engineered online book with bizarre scrolljacking (I would advise disabling JavaScript but then all the links stop working so you won’t be able to go past the table of contents) but it’s free and the content—by Marco Suarez, Jina Anne, Katie Sylor-Miller, Diana Mounter, and Roy Stanfield— looks good:
A design system unites product teams around a common visual language. It reduces design debt, accelerates the design process, and builds bridges between teams working in concert to bring products to life. Learn how you can create your design system and help your team improve product quality while reducing design debt.
The Nature of Code
A web book with interactive code examples.
How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This book focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using Processing.
JavaScript Systems Music
A massively in-depth study of boundary-breaking music, recreated through the web audio API.
- Steve Reich - It’s Gonna Rain (1965)
- Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
- Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)
You don’t have to be a musician or an expert in music theory to follow this guide. I’m neither of those things. I’m figuring things out as I go and it’s perfectly fine if you do too. I believe that this kind of stuff is well within reach for anyone who knows a bit of programming, and you can have a lot of fun with it even if you aren’t a musician.
One thing that definitely won’t hurt though is an interest in experimental music! This will get weird at times.