Archive for the ‘book’ tag
Me Likey
One of, if not *the*, book(s) in computational linguistics is Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing by Christopher Mannin and Hinrich Schuetze. I have been working my way (slowly) through this book for a personal project and feel its value to the point where I am seriously considering buying it (current copy is from the library).
Anyway, I went over to Amazon and decided to look see what other books the authors had out which lead me to Intro. to Information Retrieval
Seems like an interesting book right? But, with books like these being pretty expensive, its hard to justify buying one out right. If I did that with all the books I felt like checking out I would be much (much) poorer. So, like we all do, I fired up google to see if I could find a google books version. I found something even better: the book’s site containing a wealth of online resources including free PDF copies. Perfect.
Even as increasing number of books (SICP, Real World Haskell etcs) have an online version for free(*legally*), I think it’s laudable that the authors are doing this.
I like to buy books that are worth keeping for years so I really appreciate being able to vet what I spend my money and shelf space on.
Note to publishers: providing a free online version of a book makes it more likely that I will buy the dead tree version.The catch is the book cant be a throwaway/one time read so YMMV.