Nine Mohs

How I wish I could find ANSI Common Lisp back here. My only option is Amazon, and they’re charging more for the shipping than for the book.

I don’t think you can blame the publishers either. If there’s no demand for a book, why should they supply it? Some industries somehow manage to “create” demand (electronics, entertainment) using their hype engines, but the publishing industry is certainly not one of them (and creating demand for ANSI Common Lisp among your common NIIT whackos and B.Tech. jocks isn’t possible anyway).

People seem to think tech books are for college only. Every time someone catches me reading CLRS, they’ll go “But that isn’t even in the course!” Until people begin to comprehend that reading for the sake of enjoyment is possible, hobbies such as ours won’t take off.

Hey, I can understand your predicament; I have a photocopy of the book which I can ship to you if you want (I have the book too). I am staying in Mumbai.

“Bhang” is much better anyway :^)

“alcohol is stupid easy to get there.”
The operative word is “stupid”.
It took me a while watching what it did to 2 of my brothers.
India is the Mother of the world’s spirituality.
Ever tried “relaxing” or “getting high” on Divine Mother’s ethereal milk?

I understand SICP is the Holy Grail, but it’s very dense. A suggestion I’ve seen elsewhere is to get How To Design Programs (htdp.org) and download and install PLT Scheme (plt-scheme.org).

On your point about how hard it is to find programming books, I live near Silicon Valley here in California, and it’s becoming more difficult here, too. We used to have a chain of bookstores called Computer Literacy (one store of which was actually located in the Apple campus in Cupertino!), but they’re long gone now, thanks to online sellers. Another chain, Stacey’s Books, had stores all over the area, but their last store in San Francisco is set to close soon.

Online sellers are fine, but there’s nothing like being able to browse the shelves and skim through the books directly to see if a book is the right one. And often you’ll find a book you weren’t even looking for; I built my Lisp library at Stacey’s in one visit, while browsing there.

Here are a few free/online lisp books for you:

Practical Common Lisp:
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

On Lisp:
http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

I don’t think I, or any other American, can solve the physical book problem in an effective way; The Economist often runs articles on the difficulties of exporting to India and conducting business there in general.

But eBooks are widely available; see, for example, MIT’s Open Courseware. For C++ and Java e-books, you might try Bruck Eckel’s _Thinking in_… series.

Thinking in C++ both volumes are available in India. It’s a little expensive because only the hardcover imported edition can be found. However, the “thinking in” series is available online in Bruce Eckel’s site eckelobjects.com

I understand your predicament.
Let me tell my bit of the story–
I know that the book written by Sumita Arora is not exactly what you would want a person picking up programming to read. I know of friends of mine who hate programming. And I attribute the hatred to the book and to a certain extent the teacher. Thankfully I had the internet at my side and was able to extract a lot of useful information and came to know of lot of interesting books, blogs and tools. I would regard it as the single most eye-opener(if that makes sense). After a certain amount of time, even though the internet was still helping me improve my skill, my learning curve wasn’t growing as much as I would have liked it to. And, then I found the reason why — I was having attention deficit(if that is the term). I could not read an article which was longer than say two pages. It wasn’t a mental problem or anything, mind you, but I think it is a natural side effect of using the internet. You have such a huge amount of stuff out their that you don’t want to miss anything and so, you just go from one place to other. I have now made up for this by reading lengthy articles and blog-posts and also writing some(like this). The thing is if you really want to learn something, sacrifice the useless reddit or digg and you RSS feed for a few days and get on with your coding and reading code. This really interesting article — http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html might help.

Now, to your other problem of not getting books. I would suggest this, which one of my frugal-living (hacker) friend suggested — get an ebook and make prints of it from some place at a cheap price. You won’t have the same feeling as that of holding the real book but, at least you can read it without hurting your eyes(if at all that happens).

Another note, you come across to me as someone arrogant. If you really want to drink beer, and as you say there is a legal age set, have some sort of a protest to allow 18 year olds to drink, don’t give examples of activities and say — “They do it, why shouldn’t I”. That is stupid (No offense meant).

Good luck.

man, we indians are known to be melodramatic, but this one takes the oscar.

you have 6 books in your wish list, 3 of which are available online for free, and one from prentice hall whose indian subsidiary usually comes up with the “eastern economy editions” of popular books. not to mention the fact that a lot of popular books are usually available either in your local university library, or in your city’s textbook shops, or bootlegged and xeroxed over and available for a pittance.

Come to think of it, which city are you living that you dont have any access to such resources, and yet you seem to be working on ruby, and seem to have internet hosting?

I’ll join you in complaining about indian authors’ books being more exam oriented than language or concept oriented, but all the great books are available in the country and have been available for quite a while now. Specific to C/C++, why are you cribbing about the local authors when K&R and Stroustoup have been available from ages – in the Eastern economy edition (iirc k&r sold for Rs.100 or thereabouts)? Learn from the authors of the language, why dont you? It cant get any better than than. And if its a milder introduction you want, Robert Lafore’s book has been there too.

Another thing you could do: get access to a university library. Most university libaries allow people to enter and look around. Or they have a special program by which you can search for information separately and you can get printed copy from them. If they dont, you and I both know there’s always a way of finding, and getting a book from one. And I mean legally. Ask a friend who studies there to look and borrow it for you. Public libraries too have some books, though they tend to be dated. Places like the British library have a pretty good collection. And you know, you might find something interesting there – a european view to computing. A different perspective tends to be refreshing. Try it.

Yet another think you could do: find places in your city where they sell old books. Nowadays mostly the street book sellers sell pirated copies of Harry potter and self help best sellers, but every city has at least one area where old books are sold. And these guys have real interesting books, which you as a self professed hobbyist should look at. Computers is not just the languages of the day you know. I’ve found everything from an original book on APL(now there’s a language you probably dont know exists, but it has map reduce), russian AI books, magazines from the 80s that spoke of transputers (a la grid/cloud), and much more in the crowded corners of the city i am from.

And finally, as others have suggested: go online. There are so many books online nowadays, that a lot of people dont read offline anymore. Or if they do, they just print a pdf. If you dont have a printer, do the desi thing: get access to one that is public. Universities come to mind again. Or offices that are ok with you printing stuff out. If you have friends working at IT companies, most should be able to print you off whole books over a few days or the weekend. Friends who are network admins helps here.

“You wont even find a trace for any of the other Functional Languages” Most functional languages are from the 60s and 70s. You *will* find books on them. Look well using the ways i’ve mentioned.I’ve found books on at least Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk, APL, Prolog and Modula on the streets. I know these are not all functional languages, but they are all languages you should at least know about. Haskell is one I’ve not seen, but i’m guessing thats a new language to you.

“Although there are a lot of good free e-books around, its really difficult reading them, I can barely read a whole chapter (Wish I had a Kindle)” Get over it. What kinda computer hobbyist are you if you cant stare at a pc, huh? In fact, I’d say dont get a kindle even if you could find it in India, and afford it. Try it the hard way, find a reason to justify the kindle, and then get it. Or if you really want an ebook reader, consider the home grown simputer – its an open source, cheap (Rs.10k for the base version) tablet pc style device. I’m not sure, but it should be able to open pdf, else you can make it – its linux.

And finally, about the beer. Which city are you in where you cant get beer? Most that I know of, you can get beer. It may not be legal, but if you want to drink and code, you’re already indoors – youre safe. not that i think you need beer to code. probably the opposite.

You know what? your “lame” tag fits this post.Get out, and get a life. Or at least a book. They’re there. And so’s the beer. In India.

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture…Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.