One thing that’s particularly great about the Internet is the Sharing Economy. So much information, know-how, content is given out for free on a daily basis. Here’s three fascinating unpublished books that you can take a look at right now. And to make them even greater, you can always give the authors your feedback, bugs you’ve discovered or just a big thank you!
The first book from O’Reilly’s Early Release series is “Mastering Bitcoin” by Andreas Antonopoulos. If you want to learn more about how the new crypto-currency works or if you want to imagine how this concept will change the world or just understand how you can use the Bitcoin APIs to build your own tools, this is the place to start. I hope this book will give me lots of inspiration about analyzing and visualizing the Blockchain (see this blogpost).
“Deep Learning” is the somewhat humble title of the second book. This work by Yoshua Bengio, Ian J. Goodfellow and Aaron Courville (University of Montréal) on the theory and practice of neural networks a.k.a. deep learning could someday become a standard introduction. On their webpage, you can download and read the book chapter by chapter – but as this is work in progress, there could be quite a lot of updates in the future. So grab it while it is still fresh.
The third one is already a classic and very well received by the peer group: “Network Science” by Albert-László Barabási. This book explains the science of networks and social network analysis from the beginning (history- and concept-wise) right to the 21. century. From finding and identifying Terrorists to analyzing and optimizing organizational structure – this book abounds with colorful examples and real applications. Everyone who has been thinking “Yeah, network visualizations look pretty nice, but what’s the real use-case besides that?” should definitely take a look at this work. The best thing: it will stay free because it’s published under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, László!