Question

Does any one know of an ePub version of the Downey 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist' book?

Answer 1

Not offhand, u can get Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows

and convert the pdf yourself....

Answer 2

Yeah - I couldn't find any either. Thanks for the tip on Calibre - excellent program. I've duly converted it ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/zv2mzrkalcdxl27/How%20to%20Think%20Like%20a%20Computer%20Scientist%20-%20Allen%20Downey%2C%20Jeffrey%20Elkner%2C%20Chris%20Meye.epub). Opens fine on my phone, its not perfect because the subheadings and code doesn't show up in a different font, but its a start.

Answer 3

You can try to enable heuristic processing in the settings, it might give a better output...

Answer 4

The website for the interactive book "How to think like a computer scientist" is
http://interactivepython.org/courselib/static/thinkcspy/index.html

Answer 5

@estudier tried the heuristic processing but it still doesn't recognise the code blocks. I think I can tweak the processing using the XPath but it would be some trial and error depending on how the code blocks are are tagged. Getting this far was enough for me - if anyone else wants a better version I'll have a better stab at it.

Answer 6

Here is a PDF version if you are interested:
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/thinkCSpy.pdf

Answer 7

Most technical documents and books are in pdf format because pdf looks like a well-printed book page. I wish there was an epub version of Think Python available because my ebook reader does not handle pdf well. I have yet to find an epub version of Think Python. The problem with epub is that the epub format trashes the indentation in the Python source code, and since indentation is how you group blocks of code in Python, code listings become garbled. Calibre can convert the pdf of Think Python into epub, but the results are not great because of the loss of indentation in the source code listings. You cannot edit the epub file to add indentation because epub format cannot handle indentation. (It just ignores it.) The poetry of e.e. cummings and source code in Python just aren't handled well in the current version of epub.

I have seen another, non-Python language programming textbook in epub format. All of the code listings were png images of the source code, not text. Being images, they did not "flow" and looked OK. I don't know how the book was generated. Speaking from my experience, it is painful to generate so many images as screen captures. I would not like to do a book as long as Think Python by hand.

Answer 8

I got an epub here: https://github.com/openmac/thinkpython

Answer 9

Wow! Thanks! I am so glad to be wrong about this.

One thing - the epub you can download from https://github.com/openmac/thinkpython page gave me a "broken" thinkpython.epub. Downloading the ZIP of the whole git repository and extracting thinkpython.epub worked fine.

Now I have to look at the epub to see what magic is going on here...

Answer 10

I clicked on the file, got another page saying "view raw" and it downloaded when I clicked on that (in Windows)

Answer 11

You are correct again.

Answer 12

You can download a PDF version of the text at http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/.