EbookFoundation/free-programming-books

What this is

A curated, community-maintained list of free learning resources for programming: books by language and by subject, cheat sheets, free online courses, interactive tutorials, problem sets, podcasts and screencasts, and browser playgrounds. It started as a cleaned-up clone of a Stack Overflow book list and is now maintained by the Free Ebook Foundation, a non-profit that supports free ebooks README intro.

The repository is the source data behind two web front ends: a static site that is easier to read than raw Markdown, and a search site for looking up a book or author. Content is split across files, including English books by programming language and by subject, plus separate files for many other languages.

It is for developers and students who want a starting point for free study material, and for readers who prefer browsing a vetted index over search-engine results. It is not a book publisher, a course platform, or a place that hosts the books themselves.

How to start using it

The fastest path is the web interface, with no installation:

1. Open the static list site to browse by category and language.
2. If you already have a topic in mind, use the dynamic search and enter a book title or author.
3. Follow the entry's link to the external book or course. The repository supplies the pointer, not the file.

To work from the repository directly, open the Markdown file for your category, for example the English books by programming language or the Chinese books file.

Contributing

Changes go through pull requests. Read CONTRIBUTING first, and HOWTO if you are new to GitHub. The project also publishes a code of conduct and translations of these documents translations. Issues labelled "good first issue" and "help wanted" are the intended entry points for new contributors.

Expect list entries to be checked against inclusion rules rather than merged as-is; the repository's value comes from curation, not volume.

Usage constraints

• The repository is a list of links. Availability, licensing, and quality of each linked book or course are determined by the external provider, not by this project.
• Repository content is licensed under CC BY 4.0, which requires attribution when reusing the lists.
• The README points to a donation page for the Free Ebook Foundation; donations are described as tax-deductible in the US foundation site.
• The lists are organized by language, so choosing the right file matters: English is split by language and subject, while other languages have per-language book and course files.

HotRepo's take

On 2026-11-07 this repository recorded 179 new stars in the daily Python ranking and placed 10th on that day's Python list, with just over 401,000 total stars. Those numbers are consistent with a long-running reference project rather than a fast-moving new tool, and the list's age shows in its structure: separate Markdown files per language and category, with contribution rules in a docs/ folder.

The HN discussion from 2025-10-18 was less about the list itself and more about the habit of collecting PDFs without reading them; one commenter ran a local file search and reported 11,116 PDFs on their machine, calling out duplicates among GitHub checkouts comment. That is a fair description of the risk this kind of index carries: it makes acquisition easy, but it does not help you choose what to actually read. Use the search site to narrow to one book and start there.