Elite Universities (Stanford, MIT, Harvard, etc.) downloads?

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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers around the availability of free downloadable educational materials, such as textbooks and research documents, from elite universities like MIT, Harvard, and Cambridge. Participants explore various sources and express their preferences for accessing these materials for personal research and offline learning.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant inquires about free downloadable textbooks and research documents from elite universities, emphasizing the need for publicly available resources.
  • Another participant provides links to MIT's online textbooks and specific resources like "How to Design Programs" and "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs."
  • A different participant requests additional sources from other universities to broaden the range of materials available.
  • One contributor mentions the availability of lecture notes from DAMPT Cambridge, specifically highlighting David Tong's materials as potentially valuable.
  • Some participants allude to less scrupulous methods of obtaining materials, while expressing respect for copyright and intellectual property laws.
  • Another participant critiques the original inquiry, suggesting that the best educational resources are often not available for free and recommending alternative texts that are typically favored in academic circles.
  • Specific resources from Harvard and Stanford are mentioned, but the contributor notes that these may not be suitable for all learners, particularly those at different academic levels.
  • There is a brief exchange regarding forum rules, indicating a concern for adherence to guidelines within the discussion.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express differing views on the quality and suitability of free resources available from elite universities. While some provide specific links and resources, others question the effectiveness of such materials for comprehensive learning, indicating a lack of consensus on the best approach to acquiring educational content.

Contextual Notes

Some participants express concerns about the appropriateness of the suggested materials for different levels of learners, indicating that the resources may be advanced or not aligned with the needs of all users. Additionally, there are references to copyright considerations and the ethical implications of accessing certain materials.

icecubebeast
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Hello, I am interested in the free downloads that are publicly available on the main websites of elite universities. By "free downloads" I mean textbooks that are publicly available on the websites of the universities (in pdf or docx). That also includes public research documents from those websites (in pdf or docx).

Everything I am searching for are the ones that are public. Also if possible, please tell me if I can get the public documents in bulk downloads.

The reason I'm doing this is for my personal research and I want to learn from those courses while I'm offline. Please don't say "there are better ways to get information" because this is the method I want to get information (from the most prestigious institutions).
 
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MIT has some textbooks available online.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/online-textbooks/
Here are a few:
There is also How to Design Programs (HTDP) available here: http://htdp.org/
You can try Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP): http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
MIT's Calculus Text: http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/resources/Strang/Edited/Calculus/Calculus.pdf

Edit: The SICP guys also wrote a book called Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (SICM). It is written from a computational point of view and uses the same Scheme programming language from SICP. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html
 
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I appreciate the MIT textbooks but are there other universities you can download? Because I want a broad domain of sources.
 
Many of the professors at DAMPT Cambridge have a lot of great lecture notes. David Tong has some great lecture notes on his page, for example: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html
They could easily serve as a book. There are also some obviously less scrupulous ways to obtain online .djvu versions of books from certain Russian online library archives, which I won't discuss out of my enormous respect for US copyright and IP law...
 
nucl34rgg said:
There are also some obviously less scrupulous ways to obtain online .djvu versions of books from certain Russian online library archives, which I won't discuss out of my enormous respect for US copyright and IP law...

Not to mention our rules. :oldwink:
 
good luck with your experiment. in my opinion however, your methodology is flawed. the best books are not usually the ones available free from prestigious universities. e.g. compare that strang calculus book from MIT with the best ones usually recommended here, namely spivak, courant, apostol, kitchen.

however the books available free from the website of shlomo sternberg at harvard math dept, are good,but they still may not be appropriate for your learning.

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~shlomo/

and here are some excellent notes on algebraic geometry from stanford, but again maybe not at all suitable for you:

http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/216blog/

and anything by james milne at michigan is excellent, but again maybe not right for everyone:

http://www.jmilne.org/math/
i apologize for essentially saying" there are better ways to get information", but there are. i have tried to mitigate my opinion by giving you what you asked for, even if i don't recommend it. the main problem with the sources i have linked here is that they are very advanced. so if you are an advanced grad student they may be of use.
 
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jtbell said:
Not to mention our rules. :oldwink:
Which rules?
 
icecubebeast said:
Which rules?

At the top of any page here, click "Info" and choose "Terms and Rules."
 

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