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

AI Thread Summary
The discussion focuses on the availability of free downloadable textbooks and research documents from elite universities like MIT, Harvard, and Cambridge. Users share links to various resources, including MIT's OpenCourseWare and specific textbooks such as "How to Design Programs" and "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs." While some participants appreciate these resources, others caution that the best learning materials may not be freely available from prestigious institutions. The conversation also touches on the potential for bulk downloads and the legality of accessing certain materials. Overall, the thread highlights a desire for accessible educational resources while acknowledging the limitations of free offerings.
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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