The Mostly Harmless Library
You one-stop shop for all my educational content
Welcome to the Mostly Harmless Library!
The following is a collection of in-progress books I’m slowly writing on different topics in computer science. Feel free to browse around and pick anything you like.
The process for all these books is the same: every chapter first appears as a free article here in this blog, and then goes on through a revision process and gets incorporated in the corresponding book.
All my educational books will be published online for free browsing. You can buy lifetime access to PDF and EPUB digital copies to support them. This grants you not only the current version but all future updates for free. In time, I will also release printed copies somewhere (maybe Amazon) and share links here.
All paid subscribers of Mostly Harmless Ideas, in whatever plan, get free access to the PDF and EPUB versions. Check any of the MHI emails for a 100% discount coupon.
Also, all my books have purchasing power parity enabled, so you can get up to a 50% discount depending on which country you live.
Finally, if you are a student, a resident in a US sanctioned country, or you are in a financially stressful situation, please send me an email and I’ll be happy to extend you a full discount for any of my books.
Without further ado, here’s what you can get today.
The Mostly Harmless Compendium
This is a special bundle that contains my three currently in-progress books for the price of one. It’s the simplest way to support Mostly Harmless Ideas. Any new books I write will become part of this compendium, so getting it today grants you full access to everything I’ll write in the future.
The Science of Computation
This is my opus magna, and a love letter to computer science. It’s a journey across all the subfields in CS, from the foundational theory to the most important algorithms to how computers and the internet to artificial intelligence and beyond. It’s the introduction to CS I wish I had read when I was a teenager and the one book I want my girls to read when they’re old enough. It’s suitable for all audiences and contains zero fancy code or math, just pure intuitions.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Graphs
This book is a collaboration with Tivadar Danka, one of my favorite math educators and writers. It’s our best shot at an intuitive but comprehensive introduction to graph theory and applications, converging everything from the simplest algorithm to some of the most advanced concepts and techniques. Suitable for college students of any quantitative discipline but also for anyone with a bit of curiosity about knowledge graphs, social networks, and any other topic where graphs play a central role.
How to Train your Chatbot
This is a very practical handbook on using large language models to build all sorts of cool applications. It will feature around 15 fully working applications that you can extend or reuse to build your own, as well as comprehensive explanations of the theory behind LLMs and their most important limitations and caveats.
And that’s all for now! I’ll keep this post updated with anything I write in the future. if you want to support my work, getting one of these books is the easiest way to do so. But also, please consider sharing this post with your loved ones and spreading the word about Mostly Harmless Ideas!
This is really good. I badly need to carve out some time to do something like this for my spot.
Damn, that's quite a collection!