// the take
This isn't software — it's a flat list of links to 48 PDF textbooks on databases and SQL, stored directly in the repo and rendered as an HTML list in the README. It's aimed at someone building a self-study reading list on relational theory, SQL, and various NoSQL systems, not at developers looking for a tool or library.
The selection is genuinely broad: relational theory (Database System Concepts, Foundations of Databases), vendor-specific cookbooks (PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle), and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, Neo4j, CouchDB, RethinkDB) are all represented. A few picks are well-regarded industry staples — Designing Data-Intensive Applications and SQL Antipatterns are worth reading regardless of how you get them.
These are commercially published, copyrighted books rehosted as raw PDFs with no licensing note or permission mentioned anywhere — this is the kind of repo GitHub takedowns target, so don't build anything that depends on these links staying live. There's no code to run, nothing to install, and nothing to evaluate technically; it's a bookmark list dressed up as a repository. The list is also unmaintained since 2021 and un-curated beyond alphabetical PDF numbering — no reading order, skill-level tagging, or pruning of dated material (Microsoft SQL Azure, Azure DocumentDB, and RethinkDB are all defunct or renamed products).
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →