About this project

This project is a continuation of Stack Overflow Documentation, which ended in August 2017.

The intent is to preserve that work and improve upon it.

This project is collaborative. All documentation is released under Creative Commons BY-SA license and hosted on GitHub. Please do contribute!

Guiding principles behind Essential Books

Driven by examples

Show, don't tell.

Not limited in size

A traditional book is limited by physical size, number of pages. This limits how much information it can have.

We don't have such constraints so there's no limit to how much useful information we can add.

Documenting popular libraries, adding step-by-step tutorials for specific tasks. Everything is in scope.

Search friendly

A search bar at the top allows quick navigation to a topic of interest.

Instead of scanning table of contents, you can type the topic you're interested in.

Want to learn about strings? Type "string" in search.

We search titles of chapters and articles.

We also add most likely synonims user might use to look for a given topic for example "oop" will find "Object-oriented programming".