Awesome list of free math books
I know, I know, this hardly constitutes light reading over Spring Break. However, e-booksdirectory.com features an incredibly useful list of 260 freely downloadable electronic books (largely in PDF) that could drive entire courses or act as much-need supplements to a standard textbook.
The books are primarily college-level texts, but many could serve graduate students or high school students. High school students in particular looking to extend their studies, prepare for specific college coursework, or engage in independent study for which their schools may not have a textbook could especially benefit from these texts. Many of the books would also serve as useful reference tools for high school mathematics and computer science teachers who want to ensure that their course content is adequately rigorous for college preparation.
The list is quite comprehensive in terms of subject matter and after downloading and sampling several, they appear to be of very high quality (if they lack in anything, it seems to be in the pretty pictures that dominate high school texts, again pointing to their university orientation). A few noteworthy examples include
- Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (no, really, it's worth checking out)
- Using R for Introductory Statistics
- Algorithms
- A First Course in Linear Algebra
A few of the books are turn-of-the-century texts (as in the 20th century), but most are modern, highly usable texts. Enjoy!