posted by App on Monday, May 08, 2006
I am angry.
I have been a part of many worthwhile chatrooms dedicated to programming...helping people get started. People that are trying to better themselves and their lives by learning, with many teaching themselves. Books are expensive and not everyone can afford them. But good resources are needed if you want to get anywhere in educating yourself.
I devote part of my time searching for the books needed for these people to use. Books that are freely available by publishers & authors that can help those budding young programmers learn what they need to know in order to someday create quality software you will use.
Why do I do this? Because I am a self taught programmer too. I know how hard it is to find quality material to learn from.
About a year ago I created a page of links to all the programming books I have found...nothing illegal...only stuff that is legally available for free. I take the time to remove dead links and add news ones. I take the time to make sure they are all legal. I take the time to sort them by language. I took the time to code a page with that list and upload it to my webspace and make it available.
I took the time to get an easy to remember domain name so it can be passed along to whoever needed access to the list.
I have friends that promoted the page to all their programming students and friends, friends that helped by passing me links to add books that they have found, University students passing along the link to my site at school to other students, helping them to improve their coding skills. It spread like wildfire...faster than I would imagine was possible. My page has appeared on slashdot and digg, and many other sites. I have never submitted this link to any search engine. I didn't have to.
My page currently has a Google ranking of 4/10. It has recieved over 15,000 hits since I added a counter back in March.
I must have done something good if all this is happening. It makes me feel good inside to know I have helped people by making this page. That was all I wanted to do...help people.
Then along comes some guy who decides that instead of doing his own searches and checking books to make sure they are good enough and legal enough to offer in his own list, it would be easier to just steal my work. He copied my entire list to his site and is passing it off as his own work. He even included my personal comment I made about a book on Ruby being the funniest thing I have ever seen. Pure copy & paste theft of all my months of work.
What he did is like someone taking sourcecode they found and removing the copyright & programmer's name and replacing it with their own and passing it off as their own work, not giving any credit at all to the original author. Pure plagerism.
Compare for yourself:
my site: www.programmingebooks.tk
his site: http://www.techtoolblog.com/archives/195-free-online-programming-books
You will see for yourself what he has done.
If you feel as strongly as I do about this, leave a comment at the bottom of his page letting him know how much of a jerk you think he is for what he did.
Thank you.
Update 05/09/2006:
The jerk's account has been suspended.
I contacted his hosting provider. :-D
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