About FreeTechBooks

FreeTechBooks is a directory of computer science books that are legally free to read online. It is the successor to FreeTechBooks.com, a catalog that ran from 2003 to 2026.

What happened to the original site

FreeTechBooks.com spent more than two decades collecting free computer science textbooks, lecture notes and programming handbooks. In 2026 the domain went offline and the catalog disappeared with it. The books themselves did not disappear: most are still hosted by their authors, universities, open-textbook programs or public archives. What was lost was the index that connected readers to them.

We recovered that index from public web archives. The work included recovering bibliographic records for more than a thousand titles, rebuilding the category tree, matching authors and publishers, and checking the original source links. Where a source page is gone, the book record points to an archived copy when one exists.

What the new site changes

The new catalog keeps the useful part of the original — the books, the categories and the plain promise that every title is legally free — and rebuilds the rest:

• A cleaner record for every book: author, publisher, year, pages, ISBN, license, document type and original source.
• Filters by category, license and document type, plus a search that works on title, author and topic.
• Author, publisher and license directories that make the catalog easier to explore.
• Curated collections for common goals, from learning Python to understanding algorithms or getting started with Linux.
• A mobile-first layout, lighter pages and structured data for search engines.

How the catalog works

FreeTechBooks hosts selected open-licensed PDFs. For the rest, each book page is a record with a description, the license, the publication details and a link to the source that hosts the full text. Some links point to a publisher’s page, some to a university repository, some to an author’s site and some to the Internet Archive. When a link is broken, the record may include an archived copy.

We do not require an account, we do not put books behind a paywall and we do not sell downloads. The directory is free to use.

Editorial criteria

A book is added only when we can verify four things:

• The full text is available without payment or registration.
• The author, publisher or rights holder makes it available legally.
• The license is stated or can be identified from the source.
• The bibliographic record is accurate enough to be useful.

We prefer books that are complete, readable and still available. A title that disappears from the web is marked or removed rather than left as a dead link. If a record is wrong, we want to know.

Independence and contact

FreeTechBooks is an independent, non-commercial project. It is not affiliated with the original site’s owners, the publishers listed in the catalog or any university. If you have a correction, a suggestion or a rights concern, use the contact page.