// the find
ruanyf/free-books
互联网上的免费书籍
A flat list of links to free programming and computer science books, maintained by Ruan Yifeng (a well-known Chinese tech blogger). Primarily serves Chinese-speaking developers, with a mix of Chinese and English resources spanning web dev, systems, ML, math, and more.
Covers a genuinely wide range — from SICP to SRE books to cryptography, not just the usual beginner suspects. The bilingual entries (Chinese/English pairs) are useful; you get the translation and the original without hunting. Ruan Yifeng has enough credibility in the Chinese dev community that curation quality is higher than a random awesome-list. Some hard-to-find PDFs are bundled directly in the repo.
Last push was March 2024 and several links are already dead or pointing at outdated editions — there's no systematic link-checking. No descriptions, difficulty levels, or prereqs: it's a raw list, not a guide, so you're on your own deciding what's worth reading. Almost entirely books about learning things rather than reference material for working developers. The English-only entry in the README is a stub with maybe 10% of the content.