Dantes · Curation log
Newly Charted
Every resource below was added to the map recently — each one evaluated by a human, never by an algorithm. The map keeps growing.
This week
Programming & Tech
- youtubeNick Chapsas (YouTube)FreeRegular videos on current .NET from a Microsoft MVP: performance benchmarks, new language and runtime features as they ship, testing, dependency injection, and blunt critiques of widely used libraries. Code-heavy, typically ten to twenty minutes.
- websiteHow Async/Await Really Works in C#FreeTraces C# asynchrony from the Begin/End and event-based patterns through Task, ValueTask, and the compiler-generated state machine, with decompiled code showing exactly what await expands into and how ExecutionContext flows.
- bookConcurrency in C# Cookbook, 2nd EditionEighty-five recipes for asynchronous, parallel, reactive and dataflow code in C#: async/await patterns, cancellation, progress reporting, TPL Dataflow, System.Reactive, unit testing concurrency, and the deadlocks caused by mixing blocking and asynchronous calls. Async is where C# learners actually get hurt, and this is the only prescriptive, tested treatment of it.
- bookASP.NET Core in Action, Third EditionBuilds server-side .NET web applications step by step: minimal APIs, Razor Pages, middleware, dependency injection, configuration, Entity Framework Core, authentication, and testing. Targets ASP.NET Core 7; nearly all of it applies to later releases.
- bookC# 12 in a Nutshell: The Definitive ReferenceReference covering the whole language plus core .NET libraries: type system, generics, LINQ internals, spans and memory, async, threading, serialization, and interop. Written for people who already program; this edition targets C# 12 and .NET 8.
- courseFoundational C# with MicrosoftFreeCertification track pairing roughly 35 hours of Microsoft Learn C# modules — variables, control flow, methods, arrays, debugging, exception handling, object-oriented basics — with a freeCodeCamp exam. Browser-based exercises; a free certificate is issued on passing.
- websiteC# language documentationFreeMicrosoft's official C# guide: a tour of the language, fundamentals, tutorials, dedicated LINQ and asynchronous programming sections, plus the complete language reference and specification. Revised with every release, currently documenting C# 15. The only C# reference that is guaranteed current with each release, and the single starting point that removes the need to pick among tutorial sites.
- youtubeJacob Sorber (YouTube)FreeA Clemson CS professor's channel of short code-along videos on pointers, dynamic allocation, debugging with gdb and valgrind, processes, threads, sockets and embedded work - the mechanical C skills textbooks tend to leave implicit.
- websiteWhat Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined BehaviorFreeUndefined behaviour is the single concept that separates competent C programmers from dangerous ones. Chris Lattner's three-part LLVM series explaining why signed overflow, null dereference and type-punning are undefined, how optimizers legitimately exploit that licence, and why the resulting miscompilations blindside otherwise experienced C programmers.
- websitecppreference - C ReferenceFreeThe community-maintained reference for the C language and standard library, annotated per standard version from C89 through C23, with exact signatures, semantics, defect-report notes and runnable examples for nearly every function.
- websitecppreference — C language and standard library referenceFreeCommunity-maintained reference for the C language and its standard library, documenting every header and function with signatures, precise semantics and version markers showing which standard, C89 through C23, introduced or changed each feature. The everyday lookup for working C programmers.
- websiteBeej's Guide to C ProgrammingFreeThe free readable-in-a-browser path for someone who will not buy a book, and the fastest place to look up how a C idiom actually works. Distinct from cppreference (prose explanation, not lookup) and from CS50 (text, self-paced). Free online book taking the reader from a first program through pointers, structs, the standard library, variadic functions, multithreading and atomics, with a companion library-reference volume. Informal in tone but technically careful and kept current with recent standards.
- bookComputer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (3rd edition)Carnegie Mellon's systems textbook shows what C code becomes: machine representation of data, x86-64 assembly, the memory hierarchy, linking, exceptional control flow, virtual memory and concurrency. The companion site hosts free slides and the self-contained bomb, attack and malloc labs.
- bookThe C Programming Language (2nd edition, K&R)The language's primary source, by its creator and his colleague: 270 dense pages defining ANSI C, containing the original tutorial, the reference manual and a standard-library summary. Predates C99 onward, so it reads as canon rather than a first tutorial.
- bookC Programming: A Modern Approach (2nd edition)An 800-page teaching text built on King's spiral approach, covering C89 and C99 with worked examples, Q&A sections and several hundred exercises and programming projects. Used as a university course book and the standard recommendation for structured self-study. Kept as the single pedagogical text with graded exercises, a job Modern C does not do (Gustedt is dense and exercise-light).
- bookModern C (3rd edition, covers C23)FreeGustedt teaches C as it is written today, covering the C23 standard across five levels from first encounter to ambition: pointers, the memory model, integer semantics, threads and atomics. The author's PDF is free under Creative Commons.
- courseThe Missing Semester of Your CS Education: Shell Tools and ScriptingFreeFastest credible on-ramp: an hour of lecture plus exercises gets a learner from zero to writing and debugging real scripts, framed as engineering practice rather than syntax drill. An MIT lecture with video and exercises on shell scripting and tooling: variables, control flow, globbing, and combining find, grep, xargs and process substitution. Ends with exercises that build small automation scripts from scratch.
- websiteBash PitfallsFreeSixty-five annotated examples of shell code that looks correct and is not, each with the failure mechanism explained and a safe rewrite. Working through it shows why parsing ls, unquoted expansions and set -e break production scripts. BashGuide builds the model, Pitfalls stress-tests it against the specific failure modes that separate a script that works on your laptop from one that works on a fleet.
- bookClassic Shell ScriptingRobbins and Beebe on writing portable POSIX shell scripts, with substantial coverage of the surrounding toolset: grep, sed, awk, sort, find and xargs. Predates Bash 5 but remains the standard treatment of text-processing pipelines.
- websiteGoogle Shell Style GuideFreeGoogle's production conventions for Bash: file layout, quoting, variable expansion, function naming, checking return values, avoiding eval, and recognising when a script has outgrown the shell. Answers the question the reference manual deliberately does not: of the many legal ways to write something, which one survives a code review. Includes the 100-line rule — the honest guidance that shell has a ceiling. Short enough to read once and reuse as a review checklist.
- websiteShellCheckFreeStatic analysis tool that flags quoting bugs, word-splitting errors, portability problems and misused constructs in shell scripts. Paste a script into the web version or run it locally; every warning links to a wiki page explaining the failure and the fix.
- courseThe Missing Semester of Your CS EducationFreeMIT's short lecture series on the tooling CS curricula skip. The opening lectures cover the shell, shell scripting and the command-line environment; later ones handle editors, version control, debugging and profiling. Videos, notes and exercises are free.
- websiteGNU Bash Reference ManualFreeThe official manual for Bash 5.3, documenting shell syntax, expansions, redirections, builtins, variables, job control, line editing and history. Written by the maintainers, it is the authoritative statement of what each construct actually does.
- websiteBashGuide (Greg's Wiki)FreeThe single best free structural path through Bash, and the explicit community replacement for the discredited TLDP Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide. Teaches correct habits (quoting, [[ ]], arrays) from the first page rather than retrofitting them. Community-maintained guide on Greg Wooledge's wiki covering commands, parameters, globbing, conditionals, arrays, redirection and traps. Its companions BashFAQ and BashPitfalls document the quoting and word-splitting mistakes that silently break most beginner scripts.
- paperStatistical Challenges in Online Controlled Experiments: A Review of A/B Testing MethodologyFreePeer-reviewed review surveying the statistics of industrial A/B testing: variance reduction, sequential and always-valid inference, heterogeneous treatment effects, interference between units, and multiple testing. Maps which method addresses which problem and where open research questions remain. The natural next step after the book for anyone who will actually build or defend methodology.
- paperOverlapping Experiment Infrastructure: More, Better, Faster ExperimentationFreeGoogle's KDD 2010 paper describing the layers-and-domains design that lets one search query participate in many concurrent experiments without confounding them, plus the diversion rules, tooling and review process around it. The reference account of experimentation platform architecture.
- paperA/B Testing Intuition Busters: Common Misunderstandings in Online Controlled ExperimentsFreeKDD 2022 paper dismantling misconceptions that vendors and agencies actively promote: misread p-values, peeking and false always-valid claims, underpowered tests, and sample ratio mismatch. Ends with concrete guardrails platform designers should enforce so experimenters cannot make these errors. The corrective that makes the rest of the topic safe to read: it names, with statistical reasoning, exactly the intuitions that CRO blogs and A/B tool marketing teach wrongly.
- paperOnline Controlled Experiments and A/B Tests (Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Science)FreeThirteen-page Springer reference entry defining controlled experiments, OEC choice, randomization units, A/A validation and common pitfalls, illustrated with a real Bing ads experiment where revenue rose while user engagement metrics degraded. A compact free route into the field's core argument.
- websiteHow Not To Run An A/B TestFreeShort essay showing how repeatedly checking a running test and stopping when it looks significant inflates the false positive rate from 5% to over 25%. Explains the fixed-sample assumption and the sequential and Bayesian designs that legitimately permit early stopping. The one statistical pitfall that ruins more real experiments than any other, explained in a form a beginner can absorb in ten minutes, with a correct account of why fixed-horizon significance breaks and what the valid alternatives are.
- bookTrustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B TestingThe field's standard text, by experimentation leaders at Microsoft, Google and LinkedIn. Covers Overall Evaluation Criterion design, randomization units, A/A tests, sample ratio mismatch, and platform architecture, so a reader can design and audit trustworthy experiments end to end.
- courseA/B Testing (Udacity, taught by Google)FreeFive-lesson free course taught by Google data scientists covering metric selection and validation, ethics for experiment participants, experiment design with sample size and power, and analysis of results. Closes with a project sizing and interpreting a realistic funnel experiment.
- websiteSecurity Certification RoadmapFreeInteractive chart plotting roughly 480 security certifications across skill domains (GRC, forensics, pentesting, architecture, cloud) and beginner-to-expert tiers. Shows where Security+, CISSP and OSCP sit relative to each other and which credential matches a target role. It prevents the common failure of buying the wrong exam.
- websiteNetSecFocus Trophy Room (TJ Null's OSCP-Like Machine List)FreeTJ Null's maintained spreadsheet of HackTheBox, Proving Grounds and Vulnlab machines rated as OSCP-like, with separate harder sets for OSEP and OSWE. Gives a concrete practice queue instead of guessing which boxes match real exam difficulty. Free, continuously updated (recent revisions cover the PEN-200 v3 syllabus and added PEN-300 sections), and it directly solves choice paralysis for the hardest part of OSCP prep.
- youtubeDestination Certification CISSP MindMapsFreeFree video series of mind-map walkthroughs, one per CISSP domain section, drawing the relationships between concepts instead of listing facts. Repeated viewing builds the connected mental model needed to reason through CISSP's manager-perspective scenario questions. Complements rather than duplicates the Official Study Guide: the OSG gives depth, the MindMaps give structure and recall.
- bookISC2 CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide, 10th EditionThe ISC2-endorsed reference to all eight CISSP domains, rewritten for the 2024 Detailed Content Outline. Covers governance, architecture, asset security and operations at the managerial depth the exam's scenario questions demand, with review questions and online practice tests.
- bookCompTIA Security+ Study Guide with over 500 Practice Test Questions: Exam SY0-701 (9th Edition)Sybex's objective-by-objective SY0-701 textbook from Mike Chapple and David Seidl, with chapter reviews, hands-on labs and over 500 practice questions. Working through it supplies the structured written coverage that pairs with video training and exposes weak domains before exam day.
- websiteCompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Official Exam Objectives and DetailsFreeCompTIA's own page for Security+ V7 (SY0-701): the five weighted exam domains, question format, performance-based question policy, renewal rules and objectives download. Use it to confirm what the live exam tests before trusting any third-party syllabus.
- courseProfessor Messer's CompTIA SY0-701 Security+ Training CourseFreeFree video course covering every SY0-701 exam objective in short modular lessons, plus monthly live study groups and weekly pop quizzes. Finishing it gives full syllabus coverage and enough recall practice to sit Security+ without paid training.
- youtubeinterviewing.io Recorded Mock InterviewsFreeFull-length recordings of anonymous mock interviews between real candidates and engineers from Google, Meta and Amazon, each ending with the interviewer's unfiltered verdict. Shows pacing, hint-taking and communication failures that written guides describe but never demonstrate.
- youtubeIntro to Behavioural InterviewsFreeA former Facebook engineer who ran roughly a thousand interviews explains what the behavioural round actually scores: signal on conflict, ownership and self-awareness. Explains the round from the grader's side - what the interviewer is writing down and how a story is scored - rather than handing over a list of questions. That inversion is what makes it transferable to any company's behavioural loop.
- bookBeyond Cracking the Coding InterviewThe 2025 sequel to Cracking the Coding Interview, built around thirteen recurring problem patterns such as sliding window and topological sort. Adds 150+ worked problems, a spaced practice plan, behavioural preparation and salary negotiation guidance.
- websiteSystem Design in a HurryFreeA structured delivery framework for the 35-minute system design round: requirements, API, high-level design, deep dives. Written by former Meta and Amazon staff engineers who ran the loops, with breakdowns of commonly asked designs and levelling expectations.
- websiteVulkan Tutorial (official Khronos edition)FreeKhronos-maintained walkthrough of explicit GPU programming against Vulkan 1.4: instances, devices, swapchains, pipelines, command buffers, vertex and uniform buffers, textures, depth, mipmaps, multisampling and compute shaders, using dynamic rendering, Slang shaders and C++20 RAII bindings.
- bookReal-Time Rendering (4th edition)Reference volume for real-time graphics engineers: the GPU pipeline, transforms, shading and BRDF models, texturing, shadow techniques, global illumination approximations, acceleration and culling, image-space effects and hardware architecture, with an extensive cited literature survey in every chapter.
- bookFundamentals of Computer Graphics (5th edition)The reference text for the mathematical core of the field, and the book to reach for when a lecture derivation needs backing. This standard university textbook, teaching ray tracing and rasterisation side by side. Covers vectors and matrices, viewing transformations, sampling and antialiasing, texture mapping, spatial data structures, splines, colour science and animation; the fifth edition rewrote the shading, reflection and path-tracing chapters.
- bookPhysically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation (4th edition, free online)FreeComplete text of the fourth edition, free online. Presents the pbrt renderer as literate code alongside the theory: radiometry, BSDFs, sampling and reconstruction, Monte Carlo integration, light transport algorithms, volumetric scattering, and a chapter on GPU ray tracing.
- bookRay Tracing in One Weekend (book series)FreeThe universally cited free on-ramp to offline rendering: short enough to finish, but it ends with real Monte Carlo estimator maths, so it is a genuine bridge into PBRT rather than a toy. Three short public-domain books that go from a blank C++ file to a working path tracer: spheres, surface normals and cameras; then diffuse, metal and dielectric materials; then motion blur, BVH acceleration, volumes and Monte Carlo estimator theory.
- youtubeIntroduction to Computer Graphics (University of Utah, Cem Yuksel)FreeThe strongest free entry point: a real semester course, not a tutorial series, so it builds the mathematical foundation (transformations, projection, shading models) that tutorial sites skip. Recorded University of Utah lecture course covering the rasterisation pipeline, transformations and projections, clipping, visibility, shading models, texturing, curves and surfaces, and ray tracing, with the underlying linear algebra derived on the board rather than assumed.
- websiteMy First Language Frontend with LLVM (Kaleidoscope Tutorial)FreeLLVM's official ten-chapter tutorial builds Kaleidoscope in roughly 1,000 lines: lexer, recursive-descent parser with operator precedence, LLVM IR generation, a JIT, control flow, mutable variables, object-file emission and DWARF debug information.
- bookWriting a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from ScratchA guided project in 792 pages: compile the smallest valid C program to x64 assembly, then add one language feature per chapter through types, pointers, structs and dynamic memory. Uses language-agnostic pseudocode plus a public open-source test suite.
- bookEngineering a Compiler (3rd Edition)Cooper and Torczon's 848-page textbook treats each compiler pass as an engineering problem with explicit tradeoffs: scanning, parsing, semantic elaboration, intermediate representations, SSA-based optimisation, instruction selection, scheduling and register allocation. Third edition adds chapters on runtime naming and code shape.
- courseCornell CS 6120: Advanced Compilers (Self-Guided)FreeAdrian Sampson's PhD-level course, released for self-study with videos, notes, assigned papers and implementation tasks. Fourteen lessons cover intermediate representations, dataflow analysis, SSA, loop optimisation, alias analysis, memory management and JIT compilation, using LLVM and the teaching IR Bril. Bril keeps implementation tasks tractable in any language while the LLVM tasks touch a production toolchain.
- courseStanford CS143: CompilersFreeStanford's undergraduate compilers course, with public lecture slides, written assignments and solutions, and five programming assignments that build a working compiler for Cool, a small object-oriented language, targeting MIPS assembly.
- bookCrafting InterpretersFreeRobert Nystrom builds the Lox language twice: first a tree-walking interpreter in Java, then a bytecode virtual machine in C, covering scanning, parsing, resolution, closures, classes and garbage collection. The complete text is free online.
- bookAWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide with 900 Practice Test Questions: Associate (SAA-C03) Exam, 4th EditionSybex's exam-aligned textbook for the SAA-C03 blueprint, chapter by chapter, with review questions, hands-on exercises, and an online test bank of practice exams and flashcards. Covers compute, storage, networking, databases, security, and resilience.
- websiteTutorials Dojo AWS Cheat SheetsFreeFree bullet-point reference notes on roughly two hundred AWS services, pitched at the level of detail the certification exams test. Useful for final review of service limits, pricing models, and the comparisons exams like to ask about.
- youtubeAWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification (SAA-C03) - Full CourseFreeFifty-hour video course walking the whole SAA-C03 blueprint: EC2, VPC, S3, IAM, RDS, serverless, and the Well-Architected Framework, with follow-along labs. Structured against the current AWS exam guide rather than a generic AWS overview. The strongest free alternative to the paid Udemy/Cantrill courses everyone else recommends, and long enough to actually teach the services rather than drill answers.
- websiteGoogle Cloud CertificationFreeGoogle's certification directory covers Cloud Digital Leader, the Associate exams, and the Professional tracks. Each page carries the current PDF exam guide, a free sample-question form, the official learning path, exam cost, and renewal rules.
- websiteMicrosoft Learn CredentialsFreeMicrosoft's certification hub links every Azure exam to a free study guide, free Microsoft Learn training paths, and a free official practice assessment written by the same team that authors the exams and revised as objectives change. Azure's certification track is unusual in giving away the whole prep stack: role-based learning paths, per-exam study guides listing exactly what changed and when, and unlimited free practice assessments for AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-500 and dozens more.
- courseAWS Skill Builder Exam PrepFreeAWS's own training platform hosts a free four-step exam prep plan for every current certification: 20-question Official Practice Question Sets, domain-by-domain prep courses, and flashcards. Only the full-length Official Practice Exams sit behind a paid subscription.
- bookPrompt Engineering for LLMs: The Art and Science of Building Large Language Model-Based ApplicationsTwo engineers who built GitHub Copilot explain why prompts work in terms of how models complete text, then build up few-shot patterns, chain-of-thought, retrieval-assembled context and evaluation for production applications rather than one-off chat sessions.
- websiteEffective Context Engineering for AI AgentsFreeAnthropic's applied AI team reframes prompting as one part of curating the whole context window. Covers context rot, calibrating system prompt specificity, minimal non-overlapping tool sets, just-in-time retrieval, and compaction, note-taking and sub-agents for long-horizon tasks. This is the resource that answers the topic's hardest question - where prompting stops and retrieval, memory or architecture must take over. It gives concrete mechanisms (compaction, structured note-taking, sub-agent isolation) rather than the vague 'context is the new prompt' takes that flooded blogs afterwards.
- websiteGPT-5.2 Prompting Guide (OpenAI Cookbook)FreeOpenAI's own guide to steering its current flagship reasoning model: controlling verbosity, preventing scope drift, reasoning-effort settings, long-context handling, tool-call parallelism, schema-driven extraction from documents, and a migration table from earlier models. Reasoning models broke a lot of received prompting wisdom, and this is the clearest first-party account of what changed.
- courseAnthropic's Interactive Prompt Engineering TutorialFreeNine notebook chapters with graded exercises: prompt structure, being direct, roles, separating data from instructions, output formatting, step-by-step reasoning, examples, hallucination control, plus chaining and tool use. You write and debug real prompts, not read about them. The single best free way to actually practise rather than read - every chapter ends in an exercise that is graded against expected output, which is the only mechanism on this list that catches the gap between understanding a technique and being able to apply it. Its example code targets an older Claude model, but the failure modes it drills are model-independent.
- websitePrompting Best Practices (Claude Platform Docs)FreeAnthropic's continuously updated prompting reference, organized as per-model behavioural guidance, then techniques that apply to all current models - clarity, examples, XML structuring, extended thinking, tool use, agentic loops - then migration notes for older prompts.
- paperThe Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompting TechniquesFreeA 76-page survey of 1,500+ papers that fixes prompting's inconsistent vocabulary and organizes 58 text techniques plus 40 multimodal ones into a single taxonomy. Readers finish able to name, compare and cite techniques precisely. This is the reference map of the whole field - it replaces the endless supply of 'top 20 prompting tricks' posts with one rigorously derived taxonomy and a shared vocabulary. Nothing else in prompt engineering has this level of methodological discipline (PRISMA-style review of 1,500+ papers).
- paperDirect Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward ModelFreeDerives a closed-form mapping between reward models and optimal policies, replacing the reward-model-plus-PPO pipeline of RLHF with a single classification loss over preference pairs. The reference behind TRL's DPOTrainer and its ORPO and KTO successors.
- paperQLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMsFreeDettmers and colleagues combine 4-bit NormalFloat quantisation, double quantisation and paged optimisers with LoRA adapters to fine-tune a 65B model on one 48GB GPU. The technical basis for most consumer-hardware fine-tuning stacks in use today. Explains why a 4-bit base model can be fine-tuned without quality collapse, which is the assumption every consumer-GPU tutorial silently relies on. Also contains a still-useful data-quality result: small curated datasets beat large scraped ones.
- paperLoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsFreeFoundational and short. Reading it once removes the guesswork behind rank, alpha and target-module settings that the tutorials present as folklore. Age is irrelevant here — the field's own notation is downstream of this paper. The paper introducing low-rank adaptation: freezing pretrained weights and training rank-decomposition matrices injected into each layer. Reduces GPT-3 175B trainable parameters roughly ten-thousand-fold and adds no inference latency, unlike earlier adapter methods.
- websiteTRL: Transformer Reinforcement Learning DocumentationFreeReference documentation for the library implementing SFT, DPO, KTO, ORPO, GRPO, reward modelling and distillation trainers. Includes dataset format specifications, memory-reduction and distributed-training how-tos, and PEFT, vLLM and DeepSpeed integration guides.
- courseHugging Face smol-course: Fine-Tuning Language ModelsFreeHands-on post-training course built around SmolLM3. Units cover instruction tuning, evaluation, preference alignment, vision-language models and reinforcement learning, each with runnable TRL notebooks sized for a single consumer GPU or free Colab. The only free, structured, start-to-finish course dedicated specifically to fine-tuning rather than to LLMs generally. Actively maintained with new units, uses current TRL APIs, and every exercise runs on hardware a learner already has.
- websiteFine-tuning LLMs Guide (Unsloth Documentation)FreeEnd-to-end documentation for fine-tuning open models: choosing a base model, LoRA versus QLoRA, dataset formatting, hyperparameter selection, running training in free Colab or Kaggle notebooks, evaluating results, and exporting to GGUF or vLLM.
- paperExtracting Training Data from Diffusion ModelsFreeA USENIX Security 2023 study that recovers over a thousand memorized training images from Stable Diffusion, Imagen and DALL-E 2, including photographs of identifiable people and trademarked logos, and measures which design choices worsen memorization. It quantifies how often models reproduce training images and reports the copyright status of what it extracted.
- bookHands-On Generative AI with Transformers and Diffusion ModelsA practitioner's book from the Hugging Face Diffusers team covering how diffusion models work, Stable Diffusion internals, sampling and guidance, fine-tuning with LoRA and DreamBooth, ControlNet and inpainting workflows, and chapters on audio and video generation.
- coursePractical Deep Learning for Coders, Part 2: From Deep Learning Foundations to Stable DiffusionFreeOver thirty hours of free video lessons rebuilding Stable Diffusion from scratch, starting at matrix multiplication and autograd and working up through DDPM, DDIM, conditional sampling, textual inversion and DreamBooth, with paper-reading practice throughout. The only free course taking a reader from tensor primitives to a working diffusion implementation without hand-waving, and the depth means the understanding survives model churn. Long and demanding.
- websiteHugging Face Diffusers DocumentationFreeOfficial documentation for the Diffusers library: pipelines for image, video and audio generation, scheduler choices, LoRA and adapter loading, ControlNet usage, DreamBooth and textual-inversion training scripts, quantization and memory-offloading guides, and conceptual explanations of each component. The practical half of the topic — running models, choosing schedulers, applying LoRA and ControlNet, fine-tuning — has no better free source, and the maintainers' own docs avoid the huge volume of blog tutorials written against long-dead API versions.
- paperAdding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models (ControlNet)FreeThe paper introducing ControlNet, which adds spatial conditioning such as edges, depth, segmentation and human pose to a frozen text-to-image diffusion model using trainable copies of its encoder joined by zero-initialized convolutions.
- paperHigh-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion ModelsFreeThe CVPR 2022 paper behind Stable Diffusion. It runs the diffusion process in the latent space of a pretrained autoencoder and adds cross-attention conditioning, cutting compute enough for consumer hardware while handling text, layout, inpainting and super-resolution. Every practical tool in this topic — SD 1.5, SDXL, and their descendants — is an implementation of this paper.
- websiteWhat are Diffusion Models?FreeA continuously revised technical survey covering forward and reverse diffusion processes, the DDPM training objective, score-based formulations, classifier and classifier-free guidance, latent diffusion, ControlNet, diffusion transformers, and acceleration methods including DDIM and consistency models. The map of the whole field in one page, with consistent notation across papers that each use their own. Kept updated since 2021 rather than abandoned, so it now covers guidance, latent diffusion, ControlNet and DiT in the same framework. The reference you return to after the Nakkiran tutorial teaches the core derivation.
- paperStep-by-Step Diffusion: An Elementary TutorialFreeA 35-page tutorial deriving diffusion models and flow matching from first principles, deliberately avoiding SDEs, ELBOs and score functions. Assumes probability, calculus and linear algebra, and gives pseudocode for the sampling algorithms it derives. The single best free entry point to the mathematics. Needs no stochastic calculus or variational-bound machinery, so a reader with undergraduate probability can follow a complete derivation of DDPM and DDIM sampling and then implement it.
- bookIntroduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and SocietyFreeDan Hendrycks's course textbook, free to read online, spanning catastrophic risk taxonomies, single-agent safety, safety engineering, complex systems, machine ethics, collective action problems and governance. No machine learning background is assumed; appendices supply the needed technical and philosophical grounding.
- paperAI as Normal TechnologyFreePrinceton computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue against the superintelligence framing, separating AI methods from applications and adoption and proposing resilience-focused policy. The strongest articulated counterposition to catastrophic-risk arguments, and the essay to stress-test them against.
- paperInternational AI Safety Report 2026FreeThe second edition of the expert panel report chaired by Yoshua Bengio, written by over 100 researchers and backed by 30-plus governments and the UN, OECD and EU. It synthesises evidence on general-purpose AI capabilities, risks and safeguards.
- websiteHow To Become A Mechanistic Interpretability ResearcherFreeNeel Nanda's September 2025 roadmap for entering mechanistic interpretability: what to learn in the first month, how to run one-to-five day throwaway mini-projects, and how to build toward publishable research sprints. Gives a concrete self-directed research plan rather than a reading list.
- courseARENA: Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator CurriculumFreeFive chapters of PyTorch exercises with solutions: deep learning foundations, transformer interpretability with TransformerLens, reinforcement learning, LLM evaluations and alignment science. Working through them leaves you able to replicate interpretability papers and build evaluation harnesses yourself.
- courseTechnical AI Safety Course (AI Safety Fundamentals)FreeA facilitated cohort course covering alignment and RLHF, mechanistic interpretability, evaluations and red-teaming, AI control and scalable oversight, run over six weeks part-time or six intensive days with expert-led discussion groups. Participants leave able to critique current technical agendas.
- websiteAI Safety AtlasFreeAn open textbook in eight chapters, written by researchers at the French Center for AI Safety and updated quarterly, covering capabilities, threat models, evaluations, interpretability, oversight and governance. Readers finish able to place any safety agenda within a shared conceptual map.
- bookBeyond Vibe Coding: From Coder to AI-Era DeveloperO'Reilly title on moving past prompt-and-hope workflows toward disciplined AI-assisted engineering: specification, verification, code review of generated output, managing technical debt from AI code, and how senior judgment changes when the model writes the first draft. The only book-length treatment of this topic that argues against the hype rather than selling it — its thesis is that vibe coding is a prototyping mode and everything past a prototype needs specification and verification.
- paperDORA State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025FreeGoogle's DORA research team surveyed nearly 5,000 technology professionals on AI adoption in software delivery. Finds AI amplifies existing team capability rather than creating it, and identifies seven organizational capabilities that determine whether adoption helps or hurts.
- paperDo Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?FreeFirst large-scale user study of people solving security-sensitive programming tasks with and without an AI assistant. Those given assistance wrote significantly less secure code across several languages, yet were more confident their solutions were secure. The finding that survives model upgrades is behavioural, not model-specific: assistance induces misplaced confidence, and participants who interrogated and re-prompted the tool produced safer code.
- paperMeasuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer ProductivityFreeRandomized controlled trial in which sixteen experienced open-source maintainers completed 246 real issues from their own repositories. AI access increased completion time by 19 percent, while the same developers believed it had sped them up.
- websiteExploring Generative AIFreeAn ongoing memo series from Thoughtworks engineers, running since 2023 and still updated, examining AI coding assistants through practitioner experiments: context engineering, spec-driven development, TDD inside agent loops, supply-chain risk, and where the tools actually fail. The most rigorous longitudinal record of AI-assisted engineering anywhere.
- websiteHere's How I Use LLMs to Help Me Write CodeFreeWillison's account of his day-to-day LLM coding workflow, covering realistic expectations, training cutoffs, context control, asking for options, testing everything the model writes, and when the human should take the keyboard back. Fourteen sections of mental models rather than tool settings: LLMs as an over-confident pair programmer, context is king, you must test what it writes, human oversight cannot be automated away.
- websiteBest Practices for Claude CodeFreeAnthropic's official guide to working with an agentic coding tool: managing the context window, separating exploration from planning from implementation, writing CLAUDE.md files, giving the agent verifiable checks, and adding adversarial review before shipping.
- bookCracking the Coding Interview, 6th Edition189 problems with full solutions, preceded by chapters on how interviews are actually scored, the big-O refresher most candidates need, and an explicit five-step approach for attacking an unseen problem at the whiteboard. Its value now is the meta-content — how the round is graded, how to structure an answer aloud — more than the problem set, which online judges cover better.
- websiteTech Interview HandbookFreeFree end-to-end guide covering resume, application strategy, algorithm cheatsheets by data structure, behavioural questions and negotiation. Includes the Grind 75 practice list, which orders problems by pattern coverage rather than raw problem count.
Personal Development
- website7Sage Free LSAT Question ExplanationsFreeWritten explanations and threaded discussion for individual questions across essentially every released PrepTest, PT1 through PT159, free without a subscription. Pairs directly with official LawHub PrepTests when you need to know why an answer is wrong.
- podcastThinking LSAT PodcastFreeWeekly show from LSAT Demon founders Nathan Fox (179 scorer) and Ben Olson, running since 2014 and still shipping episodes. Covers section strategy, study scheduling, score targets, and a persistent don't-pay-for-law-school scholarship argument.
- bookThe Loophole in LSAT Logical ReasoningEllen Cassidy's 460-page treatment of Logical Reasoning, built around translating stimuli into plain language and pre-phrasing an answer before reading the choices. Matters more since 2024, when a second Logical Reasoning section replaced Logic Games.
- bookThe LSAT Trainer (4th Edition)Mike Kim's self-study system, rebuilt in its fourth edition around the current two-Logical-Reasoning-plus-Reading-Comprehension format. Roughly 160 official questions with worked solutions, original drills, and free companion study schedules running one to four months.
- websiteLSAT Argumentative Writing (Official LSAC Specification)FreeLSAC's official specification of the unscored writing task that replaced the old writing sample: a debatable issue with three or four perspectives, 15 minutes prewriting plus 35 minutes drafting, mandatory before any score is released. Rather than stage a blog post guessing at what graders want, this is the primary specification: format, perspectives-based prompt structure, 15+35 minute split, accommodations, and the hard requirement that no score is released without a completed sample.
- websiteLawHub: Official LSAT PrepFreeLSAC's own prep platform. A free account unlocks four full official PrepTests in the real digital test interface, plus lessons, drill sets, videos and one official Argumentative Writing prompt. LawHub Advantage ($124/year) adds the full PrepTest library.
- websitePoker SciencesFrench, paid. A Spin & Go tracker and a pre-flop pack that gamifies range learning.
- websiteClub PokerFreeFree. France's largest poker community: strategy forum, hand analysis, and regular freerolls.
- websiteKill TiltFrench. Free YouTube channel and an email-gated introductory course; the masterclasses are paid.
- websitePioSOLVEROne-off from around 450 euros, Windows only. The free evaluation version has the full engine but solves only two example flops.
- websiteGTO WizardFrom $49/month or $39 on annual billing. The free tier gives ten trainer hands and one post-flop solution a day. Assumes solver literacy; the undisputed market leader.
- websiteWASM PostflopFreeFree and open source, runs in the browser. A full post-flop solver at no cost. Development is suspended, but the hosted app still works.
- podcastThe Chip RaceFreeFree. Running since 2015, hosted by two professionals with results to back the advice.
- podcastChasing Poker GreatnessFreeFree. A 500-episode archive of interviews on habits and mental frameworks. On hold since mid-2025, but the back catalogue stands on its own.
- bookThe Mental Game of PokerSport psychology applied to tilt; considered mandatory reading in the poker community.
- youtubeInside the Mind of a ProFreeIn French (Dans la tete d'un pro). Free. Professional decision-making narrated hand by hand.
- podcastCrush Live Call-InsFreeWeekly live show and podcast where cash-game coach Bart Hanson reviews No Limit Hold'em hands phoned in by listeners, walking through preflop-to-river decisions and explaining common strategic mistakes; produced by CrushLivePoker.com.
- youtubePoker Math Made Simple — Equity, Pot Odds, EV and More!FreeFree. The clearest short treatment of poker arithmetic: equity, pot odds, and expected value.
- websiteUpswing Poker Pre-Flop ChartsFreeFree in exchange for your email. Cash games and tournaments only, no spin and go.
- course15.S50 Poker Theory and AnalyticsFreeJanuary IAP 2015. A complete course with lecture videos, notes and problem sets, and the only elite-institution poker course in the open.
- bookModern Poker Theory2019. The systematic GTO reference: ranges, blockers, indifference and bet-sizing theory.
- bookThe Mathematics of Poker2006. Where the Risk of Ruin mathematics comes from. The most enjoyable book on this list if you like equations.
- bookThe Course: Serious Hold 'Em Strategy for Smart Players2015. A skill-by-skill curriculum for live no-limit cash games, ordered by stake. The most-recommended modern starting point.
- bookHarrington on Hold 'em, Volume I: Strategic Play2004. The historical trilogy on tournament play, from early stages to final-table dynamics.
- bookThe Theory of Poker1987. Around 300 dense pages and the closest thing poker has to a bible. Expected value, implied odds and reverse implied odds all come from here.
- youtubePoker for BeginnersFreeFree, 86 videos. The rules and mechanics of poker, properly explained, which is harder to find than it should be.
- websiteQFIT Casino Verite SuiteCVBJ to practise, CVCX and CVData to simulate. Build a bet spread to a target Risk of Ruin rather than guessing at one; the gold standard for blackjack mathematics software.
- bookModern BlackjackFreeFree online edition. Around 540 pages backed by simulation data, from the author of the Casino Verite software.
- bookProfessional BlackjackIndex tables, betting ramps and rule-variation adjustments, including the no-hole-card games dealt in Europe.
- bookKnock-Out Blackjack3rd edition, 2015; first published 1998. The unbalanced count that removes true-count arithmetic, and the reason card counting is accessible to people who are not mathematicians.
- websiteBlackjack ApprenticeshipFreeFree training drills for basic strategy and counting speed, alongside the YouTube channel's teaching on rules and the Hi-Lo count.
- bookUltralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your CareerNine principles for running self-designed intensive learning projects - metalearning research, directness, drill, feedback, retention, intuition - drawn from documented case studies including the author's compressed MIT computer-science curriculum. Readers finish able to scope, sequence and schedule their own project.
- websiteHow to Write Good Prompts: Using Spaced Repetition to Create UnderstandingFreeBook-length guide to writing spaced-repetition prompts that produce understanding rather than rote recall, covering factual, procedural and conceptual knowledge through a sustained worked example. Readers finish able to diagnose and rewrite their own weak cards. The one piece that closes the gap between knowing retrieval practice works and actually being able to do it - everyone who adopts a spaced-repetition system writes bad prompts first, and this is the only rigorous treatment of the craft.
- websiteAugmenting Long-term MemoryFreeEssay on using Anki to internalize entire research papers and technical fields rather than isolated trivia, with concrete card-design patterns and the cognitive-science case that memory underpins understanding. It argues from de Groot and Simon's chess-expertise work that internalized chunks are a precondition for expert reasoning, which is the missing conceptual bridge between the research literature and daily practice. Readers finish able to run a serious spaced-repetition practice.
- paperImproving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational PsychologyFreeA 55-page peer-reviewed review rating ten study techniques - practice testing, distributed practice, elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, highlighting, rereading and others - against the generalizability evidence. Readers finish able to justify which strategies to adopt and which to abandon.
- websiteCargo Cult Science (Caltech Commencement Address, 1974)FreeFeynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address on scientific integrity, using cargo-cult airstrips as the image for work that copies the form of science without the substance. Source of the maxim that you are the easiest person to fool. Reading it in twenty minutes gives more usable epistemics than any 'critical thinking' course in this subcategory, and it costs nothing.
- bookSuperforecasting: The Art and Science of PredictionA book that makes clear thinking falsifiable — it supplies a scoring rule, so the reader can find out whether their models actually work rather than just admiring them. Tetlock's report on the IARPA forecasting tournament, where volunteer forecasters beat intelligence analysts. Covers Brier scoring, base rates, breaking questions into tractable parts, updating in small increments, and the measurable habits that separate accurate forecasters from confident pundits.
- bookThinking, Fast and SlowKahneman's account of forty years of research with Amos Tversky on judgment under uncertainty: anchoring, availability, representativeness, framing, loss aversion and regression to the mean, with the experimental evidence behind each. The primary source for most popular bias writing.
- bookThinking in Systems: A PrimerMeadows, lead author of The Limits to Growth, explains stocks, flows, feedback loops, delays and leverage points, then shows why complex systems resist intervention and where small changes actually shift behavior. The standard introduction to systems thinking.
- websitePoor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. MungerFreeThis is the source document the entire mental-models genre is derived from, available in full at no cost. Eleven talks by Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman Charlie Munger, including the 2005 'Psychology of Human Misjudgment' checklist of twenty-five cognitive tendencies and his argument for a latticework of models from physics, biology, economics and psychology. Full text and audio, free.
- websiteObsidian Help (Official Documentation)FreeOfficial documentation for Obsidian: creating a vault, Markdown syntax, internal links and backlinks, tags and properties, plugins and themes, Web Clipper, and syncing. Kept current with each release by the development team.
- paperCommunicating with Slip Boxes (Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen, 1981)FreeLuhmann's own 1981 essay on why he treated his slip box as a communication partner: the roles of arbitrary internal branching, reference structure, and surprise in generating ideas. Full English text with translator's notes.
- websiteEvergreen Notes — Andy Matuschak's Working NotesFreeA public note collection arguing notes should be atomic, concept-oriented, densely linked and written for yourself. The site is itself a working example: navigation happens by following links between notes rather than a hierarchy. The rare case where the artifact demonstrates the practice — you learn the method by reading a system built with it. Free, continuously maintained, and it directly addresses the topic note's 'a system you keep using' angle by arguing note-taking is a thinking discipline, not an app choice.
- websiteIntroduction to the Zettelkasten MethodFreeBook-length free essay covering the history of Luhmann's slip box, the anatomy of a single note, ID schemes, structure notes, and how connections between notes rather than collection produce new thinking. Tool-agnostic throughout.
- bookSilman's Complete Endgame CourseThe endgame reference slot. Endgame theory sorted by rating band, so a player studies only what their current strength requires and returns as they improve. Runs from basic mates through rook endings to master-level material, roughly 530 pages.
- bookHow to Reassess Your Chess (4th Edition)Silman's imbalance framework — minor-piece quality, pawn structure, space, material, initiative — reframes position assessment as a search for imbalances rather than a hunt for good moves. Dense, exercise-heavy, aimed at players pushing past 1400. Silman supplies an explicit mental model for evaluating any middlegame.
- bookLogical Chess: Move by MoveThirty-three complete games annotated on every single move, with the reasoning spelled out rather than assumed. The classic bridge from knowing the rules to understanding development, piece activity, and kingside attacks. Explaining every move is the whole pedagogical point, so it teaches a thinking habit rather than move memorisation.
- youtubeBuilding Chess HabitsFreeGM Aman Hambleton plays from a 400 rating upward while binding himself to an explicit, tiered ruleset, unlocking new rules only as the rating climbs. The narration turns vague advice into a checkable thinking routine for club-level play.
- websiteLichessFreeFree, ad-free, open-source chess server whose training stack covers the whole improvement loop: guided basics, endgame and tactical drills, rating-adaptive puzzles, opening explorer, Stockfish game review, and shareable annotated studies.
- bookBlackjack Attack: Playing the Pros' WayDon Schlesinger's statistical treatment of professional-level counting: bet-spreading efficiency, risk-of-ruin calculations, the Illustrious 18 index plays, and the bankroll needed to survive variance as a counter.
- bookBeat the DealerEdward Thorp's original 1962 mathematical proof that basic strategy and card counting overcome blackjack's house edge; the book that launched advantage play and every card-counting system that followed it.
- websiteCard Counting in BlackjackFreeMathematical explanation of card counting from actuary Michael Shackleford, covering running count, true count conversion, the Hi-Lo system, and a breakdown of which playing decisions (standing, insurance, doubling) counting most affects.
- youtubeBlackjack ApprenticeshipFreeVideo library run by Colin Jones's professional card-counting team, teaching basic strategy, the Hi-Lo count, true count conversion, and bet spreading through structured lessons and real casino play-throughs; core content is free.
Music & Audio
- websiteThe Jazz Handbook (Jamey Aebersold)FreeAebersold's free 56-page 'red book' PDF: chord and scale nomenclature, the Scale Syllabus, ii-V-I patterns, practice procedures, a listening list and transcription advice. The reference sheet to keep on the music stand while working through everything else.
- youtubeHal Galper's Master ClassesFreeFilmed masterclasses on the rhythmic side of improvising: forward motion, beat center, syncopation, time and tone, the illusion of an instrument. Galper attacks why players fail to swing despite correct note choices, and what to change in the practice room. Covers the dimension Levine and the Omnibook both omit: time.
- bookCharlie Parker Omnibook, Volume 1 (C Instruments)Sixty note-for-note transcriptions of Charlie Parker's recorded solos with chord symbols and metronome markings, plus streaming accompaniments. Working through these gives you bebop vocabulary in its original form - the source material jazz educators assign for learning the language. This is the reference transcription collection, universally assigned in jazz programs.
- bookHow to Improvise: An Approach to Practicing ImprovisationHal Crook's method splits improvising into when to play, how to play and what to play, isolating one variable at a time - space, phrase length, dynamics, range, rhythmic density. Includes graded exercises and a sample daily practice schedule you can actually follow. Its 'one thing at a time' structure is a mental model, not a lick collection.
- bookThe Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, BeethovenPianist and critic Charles Rosen's account of how Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven used sonata form, tonality and phrase rhythm as a shared language. Assumes some score reading and rewards listening to the works alongside the argument.
- bookThe Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth CenturyNew Yorker critic Alex Ross traces twentieth-century composition from Strauss and Mahler to Britten, Shostakovich, Cage and Reich, tying each score to the politics and places around it. A Pulitzer finalist that makes modern repertoire audible rather than forbidding.
- podcastSticky Notes: The Classical Music PodcastFreeConductor Joshua Weilerstein's episode-per-work podcast, running since 2017. Each show takes a single piece or composer apart using recorded excerpts, explaining structure, harmonic turns and performance choices, alongside interviews with working performers and composers.
Mathematics
- bookEuclidean Geometry in Mathematical Olympiads (EGMO)The standard modern olympiad geometry text: cyclic quadrilaterals, power of a point, homothety, then complex numbers, barycentric coordinates, inversion and projective methods. Over three hundred contest problems, with the author's errata and reader notes hosted free. Olympiad geometry is the one subject where general problem-solving texts are insufficient - it has its own toolkit (complex numbers, barycentrics, inversion) that Zeitz and Engel barely touch. This is the acknowledged modern treatment, and the specialist slot in the set.
- bookProblem-Solving StrategiesThirteen hundred competition problems organized by strategy - invariance, coloring, extremal principle, pigeonhole, functional equations - with full solutions. Less a textbook than a drill bank for grinding technique after you know what proofs are.
- bookThe Art and Craft of Problem Solving (3rd Edition)Teaches problem-solving as a discipline rather than a topic list: investigation, wishful thinking, invariants, extremal arguments, then the four standard olympiad subjects. Where Engel drills and Evan Chen goes deep on technique, Zeitz explains the meta-level habits - how to open a problem you have no idea how to start, when to look for an invariant, why extremal arguments work. It is the one book here that a motivated learner with no proof background can start cold. Written by a 1974 IMO gold medallist and long-time olympiad coach.
- websiteIMO Official Problem Archive (1959-present)FreeOfficial papers from every International Mathematical Olympiad since 1959, in the original languages and English, alongside country results and medal thresholds. The primary source for what IMO problems actually look like. Also useful beyond the problems themselves: the results tables show what score actually earns a medal, which calibrates expectations better than any commentary.
- websiteAoPS Wiki: AMC, AIME and USAMO Problems and SolutionsFreeComplete archive of AMC 8, AMC 10, AMC 12, AIME, USAMO and USAJMO papers, every problem with multiple community-written solutions. The standard practice ground for working up the American competition ladder. Practice against real past papers is the non-negotiable core of olympiad training, and this is the free, complete, solution-annotated archive for the AMC-to-USAMO ladder.
- websiteMath Olympiad Beginner's PageFreeA coach's blunt roadmap for entering proof-based competition math: which contests to enter first, why USAMTS suits beginners, how much to read versus solve, and which books are worth buying at each stage.
- websiteEvan Chen's Olympiad HandoutsFreeFree LaTeX handouts from a 2014 IMO gold medallist covering olympiad inequalities, functional equations, projective geometry, proof-writing style, and an unofficial olympiad syllabus. The working technique notes MOP and OTIS students actually train from.
- websiteThere's More to Mathematics Than Rigour and ProofsFreeThe mental model that stops a learner from misreading this whole topic. Newcomers to proofs typically conclude that rigour replaces intuition and then stall; Tao's three-stage framing tells them what rigour is for and what comes after. Fields medallist's short essay on the pre-rigorous, rigorous and post-rigorous stages of mathematical development. Explains why formal proof exists at all: to destroy bad intuition and sharpen good intuition, not to replace intuition with symbol pushing.
- paperHow to Write Proofs: A Quick GuideFreeTen-page guide from a Sheffield category theorist on the craft of writing a proof: planning before writing, what a proof must contain, common errors, and worked examples showing the gap between a correct idea and a readable argument. Its brevity is the point - it is the thing a learner actually rereads before submitting work.
- websiteHow To Prove It With LeanFreeSolves the hardest problem for a self-learner in this topic: with no grader, you cannot tell whether your proof is actually correct or merely feels correct. Lean answers that mechanically. Velleman's free companion has you re-do How to Prove It exercises inside the Lean proof assistant, which refuses to accept a gap. Machine checking exposes the hand-waving that a human grader often lets pass.
- bookInformation Theory: From Coding to LearningFreePolyanskiy and Wu's modern graduate text, free in full from the author's MIT page. Extends classical coding theory into f-divergences, finite-blocklength bounds, minimax statistical estimation and information-theoretic lower bounds used across machine learning theory.
- paperA Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon, 1948)FreeThe paper that created the field, both Bell System Technical Journal parts in one 55-page PDF. Shannon derives entropy from three axioms, proves the source and noisy-channel coding theorems, and defines capacity. Shannon's own framing of what a 'bit' is and why entropy must take its form is clearer than most textbook restatements, and reading it inoculates a learner against the pop-science distortions of the subject. Startlingly readable primary source.
- bookElements of Information Theory (2nd Edition)The canonical citation of the field and the reference a learner returns to for a precise statement of any theorem. Theorem-by-theorem development of the AEP, source and channel coding theorems, rate distortion, network information theory, hypothesis testing and the Kolmogorov complexity connection, with the field's most complete problem sets.
- youtubeInformation Theory, Pattern Recognition, and Neural Networks (Cambridge, 16 lectures)FreeMacKay's complete 2012 Cambridge lecture course, sixteen sessions filmed in the Pippard Lecture Theatre. Covers entropy, compression, noisy-channel coding, error-correcting codes, Bayesian inference and neural networks, with the blackboard derivations and physical intuition the book compresses.
- bookInformation Theory, Inference, and Learning AlgorithmsFreeMacKay's Cambridge text develops entropy, source coding, channel capacity, Hamming and LDPC codes, then shows the same mathematics driving Bayesian inference, clustering and neural networks. MacKay refuses to separate coding from inference, so a learner leaves with one mental model instead of two disconnected ones. Full PDF is free from the author's site. Heavy exercise sets with worked solutions.
- websiteVisual Information TheoryFreeChristopher Olah builds entropy, cross-entropy, KL divergence and mutual information from variable-length codes using interactive diagrams. After reading you can picture why these quantities have their formulas rather than memorising them, and read ML loss functions fluently.
- bookThe Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic2nd edition, 2009. The primary text on gambling mathematics, and heavy going. The place to end up rather than the place to start.
- bookPractical Casino Math2nd edition. The textbook version of Hannum's free casino-math guide; only worth buying for the full treatment.
- paperThe Economics of Casino GamblingFreeFree on the AEA site. The source of the house-advantage and standard-deviation table used in casino-math introductions.
- websiteReports, Data Sets & Research GuidesFreeFree datasets: Nevada 1990-2025, Atlantic City 1978-2013, and dedicated hold-percentage series going back to 1992.
- websiteGaming Revenue ReportsFreeFree primary data, monthly, 2004 to date. Twelve-month rolling win and win percentage by game.
- websiteWizard of OddsFreeHouse-edge tables, a rule-variations calculator that prices each rule change individually, and a basic-strategy calculator for any rule set, including European no-hole-card.
- paperA Guide to Casino MathematicsFreeFree 25-page PDF covering handle, drop, hold, house edge, and the 'theo' formula casinos use to rate players.
Health & Medicine
- bookPrioritization, Delegation, and Assignment: Practice Exercises for the NCLEX Examination, 6th EditionPractice exercises drilling the management-of-care items candidates most often miss: which patient to assess first, what may be delegated to an LPN or assistive personnel, and which findings to escalate. Sixth edition adds NGN-style questions and case studies.
- bookSaunders Comprehensive Review for the NCLEX-RN Examination, 9th EditionSilvestri's roughly 1,100-page content review covering every nursing area in the test plan, with about 5,700 practice questions in print and online, Next Generation item types, clinical judgment boxes and rationales for each answer option. The one book that maps content to the test plan end to end rather than only drilling questions, which is what a candidate rebuilding weak areas needs.
- courseUWorld NCLEX-RN QBankQuestion bank of roughly 3,400 items including 750 Next Generation formats, with adaptive computerized-adaptive-style practice tests, up to six self-assessment exams, and illustrated rationales for every option. Written by practising registered nurses and nurse educators.
- websiteRegisteredNurseRN Free NCLEX QuizzesFreeNurse Sarah's free quiz library with rationales, spanning pharmacology, EKG rhythm interpretation, fluids and electrolytes, acid-base, maternity, pediatrics, dosage calculation and body systems. Most quizzes pair with a teaching video on the same site's YouTube channel. The strongest genuinely free content-plus-questions pairing in a niche where nearly everything is a funnel to a subscription. No sign-up wall, rationales included, and the quiz-plus-video pairing makes it usable for remediation rather than just score-chasing.
- youtubeKlimek Reviews (official Mark Klimek channel)FreeFree videos from the authorized Mark Klimek channel covering prioritization rules, ABC versus CAB decisions, unexpected-finding logic, must-know drug classes and select-all-that-apply technique. Aimed at answering strategy rather than systematic content coverage.
- websiteNCSBN Clinical Judgment Measurement ModelFreeNCSBN's explanation of the layered model behind Next Generation NCLEX items, ending in six cognitive skills: recognize cues, analyze cues, prioritize hypotheses, generate solutions, take action, evaluate outcomes. Includes downloadable model diagram and clinical judgment skills cards. The 2023 format change is the thing candidates most often misunderstand, and almost every explanation online is a paraphrase of this page. Going to the source removes a layer of distortion.
- websiteNCLEX-RN and NCLEX-PN Test Plans (NCSBN)FreeNCSBN's official blueprints for the NCLEX-RN and NCLEX-PN, effective April 2026 through March 2029. Free PDFs listing every client-needs category with its percentage weighting, item-type descriptions, clinical judgment coverage and exam administration rules.
Business & Entrepreneurship
- youtubeHow to Negotiate Your Job Offer - Prof. Deepak MalhotraFreeAn informal Harvard Business School session where Malhotra walks through fifteen rules for negotiating an offer, covering likability, credibility, negotiating multiple issues at once, handling ultimatums, and reading who actually holds decision power.
- websiteSalary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More ValuedFreeA long-form essay on compensation negotiation: why to never name a number first, when the negotiation actually starts, how employers model fully-loaded employee cost, and how to trade across benefits, equity and scope rather than base salary alone.
Arts & Design
- websiteDieter Rams: Ten Principles for Good DesignFreeVitsoe's primary-source presentation of Rams' ten principles, each with the Braun and Vitsoe products that produced it. Short, freely licensed, and the origin of most secondhand 'good design' checklists - worth reading in the original with the examples attached.
- courseProduct Design: The Delft Design ApproachFreeTU Delft's six-step design methodology, moving from studying users in their own context to framing a design challenge, generating ideas, developing concepts and testing them. Teaches named, reusable methods rather than one-off tricks, with assignments applied to your own brief.
- bookManufacturing Processes for Design ProfessionalsEncyclopaedic reference covering seventy-plus production processes grouped as forming, cutting, joining and finishing, plus a directory of fifty materials. Each entry gives cost, speed, tooling and environmental trade-offs, so you can judge whether a form you drew can actually be made. Covers the materials-and-manufacturing pillar with real process constraints rather than a glossary. Teaches a selection framework (process capability vs. geometry, volume and cost) that transfers to processes invented after publication.
- bookSketching: Drawing Techniques for Product DesignersThe standard reference for product design drawing, written by TU Delft's design-drawing faculty. Covers perspective construction, ellipses, shadow and reflection, material rendering and marker technique, with worked examples from practising designers and enough structure to build a daily sketching habit.
- bookDesigning for PeopleDreyfuss founded American industrial design practice; here he explains how he worked with clients, observed users in situ, and built the anthropometric figures Joe and Josephine. Establishes ergonomics and human factors as the discipline's foundation rather than styling.
- bookThe Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded Edition)Norman's account of why physical products confuse the people using them: affordances, signifiers, mapping, constraints and feedback. Gives you the vocabulary to diagnose a bad door, stove or remote control and argue for a specific fix.
- websiteMuddy ColorsFreeA collective blog where twenty-plus working illustrators, among them Dan dos Santos, Greg Manchess, Paolo Rivera and art director Lauren Panepinto, post near-daily on process, composition, materials, art direction and the economics of an illustration career. A decade-plus archive of professionals explaining specific finished commissions - reference, thumbnails, art-director notes, revisions - which is the closest thing online to watching real jobs get made.
- podcastThe Illustration Department PodcastFreeGiuseppe Castellano, an art director for nearly twenty years at Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, interviews illustrators, agents and editors about how children's-book, editorial and publishing assignments are won, briefed, revised and paid. Gives the buyer's side of the transaction, which almost no illustrator-made content does: what an art director looks for in a portfolio, why a submission is passed over, how briefs and revisions actually run.
- podcast3 Point Perspective: The Illustration PodcastFreeWorking illustrators Jake Parker, Lee White, Samantha Cotterill and Anthony Wheeler talk through craft and the business around it: portfolio decisions, style development, agents, contracts, pricing and marketing, plus interviews with full-time picture-book illustrators. Episodes are about decisions - what belongs in a portfolio, how to price, when a style is actually working - not software steps.
- bookGraphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines, 17th EditionThe Guild's reference on what illustration work is worth and how to contract for it: rate and salary data by market, copyright and licensing, negotiation, sample contracts, and a 2025 chapter on generative AI and artists' rights.
- bookWriting with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children's BooksCaldecott medalist Shulevitz covers picture-book making end to end: telling a story visually, pacing across page turns, dummy and layout planning, character and setting, and preparing art for reproduction, with an appendix on finding a publisher. The reference text for narrative illustration: it treats the book as a designed sequence rather than a set of pretty pictures, which is exactly the discipline gap between drawing and illustrating.
- bookPicture This: How Pictures Work (25th Anniversary Edition)Molly Bang rebuilds Little Red Riding Hood from cut-paper shapes to show how size, placement, colour and contrast create feeling. A short, exercise-driven account of why a picture reads the way it does. The single best answer to 'why does this image feel dangerous / calm / unstable?' It teaches seeing and decision-making rather than tools, and its conclusions are demonstrated rather than asserted. I
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