A curated list of the little books.

Inspired by the awesome list thing.

Node.js. It’s the latest in a long line of “Are you cool enough to use me?” programming languages, APIs, and toolkits. In that sense, it lands squarely in the tradition of Rails, and Ajax, and Hadoop, and even to some degree iPhone programming and HTML5.

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll hear that Node.js (or, as it’s more briefly called by many, simply “Node”) is a server-side solution for JavaScript, and in particular, for receiving and responding to HTTP requests. If that doesn’t completely boggle your mind, by the time the conversation heats up with discussion of ports, sockets, and threads, you’ll tend to glaze over. Is this really JavaScript? In fact, why in the world would anyone want to run JavaScript outside of a browser, let alone the server?

The good news is that you’re hearing (and thinking) about the right things. Node really is concerned with network programming and server-side request/response processing. The bad news is that like Rails, Ajax, and Hadoop before it, there’s precious little clear information available. There will be, in time — as there now is for these other “cool” frameworks that have matured — but why wait for a book or tutorial when you might be able to use Node today, and dramatically improve the maintainability.

Node.js patterns and core libraries, JS gotchas, control flow and Socket.io.

Learn about software synchronization by solving a series of puzzles.

"A Byte of Python" is a free book on programming using the Python language. It serves as a tutorial or guide to the Python language for a beginner audience. If all you know about computers is how to save text files, then this is the book for you.

The Little Go Book is a free introduction to Google's Go programming language. It's aimed at developers who might not be quite comfortable with the idea of pointers and static typing. It's longer than the other Little books, but hopefully still captures that little feeling.

Ruby has taken the programming world by storm. With the slow decline of Java and the catalyst of Rails, it has risen to become one of the most popular programming languages, rising to #10 on the TIOBE index and winning their "Programming Language of the Year" award.

Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book is a book about this fine language, but it is not a language book per se. It is perhaps best described as a mix between your favorite novel, your favorite Spanish textbook, and a Richard Simmons exercise video: it walks you through the very basics of working with Ruby, but by the end of it, you'll no doubt be sweatin' it to the oldies. It covers the base syntax of the language, including working with values, flow control, and object oriented programming, into some of the library functionality of Ruby, such as databases, web services, and string manipulation.

Expect this book to rock your world. Or at least teach you a programming language.

The Little MongoDB Book is a free book introducing MongoDB.

The book was written shortly after the creation of the MongoDB interactive tutorial. As such, the two can be seen as complementary.

The Little Redis Book is a free book introducing Redis.

An introduction to distributed systems.

Walks you through every major concept in CSS layout, without trying to simplify away the underlying mechanisms described in the CSS 2.1 and flexbox specs.

Single page web apps and good practices around writing single page apps.

How to do stuff RESTful