Alternatives
Products that do what Book Cheaply - Don't buy textbooks you don't need (side project) does
In short, Rate My Professor for books. http://www.bookcheaply.com/ As a college student I bought many textbooks that I never used. I could have saved significant amounts of money if I had some sort of website where I could find out if the book was necessary for my courses. Out of that frustration, Book Cheaply was born. I currently only have two schools, Grand Valley State University(GVSU) and Grand Rapids Community College(GRCC). I'm already starting to rank pretty high on Google for queries like: <instructor name> gvsu, or <instructor name> <some course> gvsu, which…
- 1FE
I am excited to announce the launch of my e-book on Graphics/WebGPU programming! This project has consumed much of my spare time, during which I developed various tools to facilitate the publishing process, including a code playground and a static site generator that can reference sample codes. However, I'm feeling burnt out and ready to call it finished, even though it may not feel completely done. Avoiding another abandoned side project has been my primary motivation in reaching this point.
2024 · shi-yan.github.io
- 2IW
Hey HN! I've been working on a book about WebAssembly over the last few months, and it's finally available at http://levelupwasm.com! Why a book on WebAssembly you ask? Well... WebAssembly is awesome (obviously ) but it's certainly not the easiest thing to learn. So I wrote this book as a practical intro to using WebAssembly in your web apps. I would appreciate any feedback!
2019
- 3IW
Good math problems are hidden inside textbooks and online documents. To keep up with all the sources in the world is hard. For someone who just wants to continuously solve problems, finding and going through all the sources feels like a hassle. I wished for a website that could just dump all the math problems available in the world out there. And if I could filter the problems by topics, that would be beautiful. teachyourselfmath is a side project that was born out of this need. At its core, it is a math PDF extraction engine. The engine has some machine learning going on behind the scenes…
2024 · teachyourselfmath.app
- 4IW
2021 · practical-go-lessons.com
- 5IW
https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-j... This book is a distillation of everything I’ve learned about what effective development looks like in Java (so far!). It's about how to organize programs around data "as plain data" and the surprisingly benefits that emerge when we do. Programs that are built around the data they manage tend to be simpler, smaller, and significantly easier understand. Java has changed radically over the last several years. It has picked up all kinds of new language features which support data oriented programming (records,…
2024
- 6IM
Hi everyone! I’m the founder of Explanations (https://explanations.app). I’m building a website where students can get college level math & physics help for 1/10th the cost of private tutoring. You’d type a question, and your teacher replies by drawing a Youtube/KhanAcademy-style video; and this happens asynchronously throughout the week. When I was studying at MIT, I often had to wait 40-60 minutes in line just to get 5 minutes of “help” from a TA - when I needed 1-2 hours. I understood that TAs can’t spend all their time helping me. That’s understandable. But what made…
2024
- 7
- 8IM
Hello. This year I dived into UI/UX area and at the same time I work as a web developer. I sincerely love making good UI. But at my full time job it's not always possible due to different reasons =\ So I've been posting random UI/UX staff on Twitter, then I made a free book that had 50 tips (posted it here as well). I decided to finish this year by collecting everything I learned and here it is: https://akcium.gumroad.com/l/ui-ux-tips. This time it's a paid one. But, you can check ~20 pages of it, just go to…
2021
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12FT
Author here. Feel free to send questions of any kind.
Apr 2026 · thermodynamicsbook.com
- 13
- 14PP
Hi everyone! I just released the Practical Python Projects book! (https://practicalpython.yasoob.me) I am happy to announce the first version as a release candidate. I have poured a lot of love into writing this book and would love to hear what you guys think. (A limited 100% off and discount coupons at the end) This is not a pure beginner book. The book does assume some background Python knowledge. You need to know the basics like methods, functions, classes, and such. If I use something that is not typically covered in beginner Python books, I will explain it before I use it.…
2021 · practicalpython.yasoob.me
- 15
- 16
- 17MF
Hey, everyone I made a website that lets you find study partners/groups based on the specific course/book you are studying. It's 100% free + no registration required. Why: I know there are many subreddits for finding study partners. But, one of the biggest reasons we can't find the right partner/group is lack of clarity. Most posts that I read on Reddit were something like: "I'm interested in programming. Let's study Python together..." - That's not a clear goal. But, when you say "Let's study the Python for Everybody course on Coursera. I'm from Mumbai, India, and I'm looking…
2024 · moocable.com
- 18
- 19HN
I love books! I had once come across a great list of book recommendations on the LessWrong website ("The Best Textbooks on Every Subject"). But when I had stumbled upon the list a couple of years ago the last comments and recommendations on it were from 2011. And similarly I found that most recommendations on the web suffer from this form of time decay. What I wanted was a site that had high quality recommendations similar to the LessWrong list that would feel fresh and current. Amazon was overwhelming for me since it has a gazillion books on each subject and the "Thanks! Arrived in good…
2015
- 20
- 21IW
Hi HN! During the last few years, I worked on a few applications built with Go, running on AWS Lambda. As I got to know the platform better, I started to find Go & Lambda to be a really productive combination. The applications were fast, and they ended up being much cheaper to run than what my team & I had built before. It’s probably not the best platform for _every_ application, but I was surprised at how much of our workload worked well on it. As we brought new engineers on to our team and helped them get up to speed with the stack, I found that we were covering a lot of the same topics…
2021
- 22PC
I created a site (https://printableclassics.com) that allows you to download classic books and customize things like the font size, page size, and the cover. As part of this, I wrote a software pipeline that takes epubs, html files, or pdfs and converts them into formatted books with custom covers, page numbers, chapter formatting, etc. I used an LLM for categorizing the books. There's a nice way to filter such that you could easily find "Young Adult, Ancient, Fantasy" for example. When downloading from the site, the PDFS are rendered in a work queue. Hopefully the server I'm using…
Feb 2026 · printableclassics.com
- 23SBShelvy Books▲52
Hey HN! I built a little side project I wanted to share. Shelvy is a free, visual bookshelf app where you can organize books you're reading, want to read, or have finished. Sign in to save your own collection. Not monetized, no ads, no tracking beyond basic auth. Just a fun weekend project that grew a bit. Live: https://shelvybooks.com Would love any feedback on the UX or feature ideas!
Jan 2026 · shelvybooks.com
- 24IW
Pre-covid, I was traveling full time to teach ReactJS to corporate clients. My students (mostly developers at banks and insurance companies) would ask me 'What's a good React book?' and I would struggle to recommend something, knowing that all the books sucked or were really out of date. When all my face-to-face training work dried up and I really didn't want to do online training, I magically got a contract to write a book. I started by reading all of the best-selling books on React, and, yeah, they were all really out of date, incomplete, or just wrong. As I started writing what I hoped…
2022
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →