The purpose of this article is to identify insightful and well written Linux books that can be downloaded without charge. The majority of the books featured in this article are themselves released under an open source license.
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5 Sparkling Game Engines – develop great cross-platform games
Game engines play a crucial role in the fast creation and development of computer games. As they offer a collection of visual development tools, and are often presented in an integrated development environment, they vastly accelerate the development of games.
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musikcube – free terminal-based audio player and streaming server
musikcube is a marvellous console application. It’s lean, looks beautiful, offers a good range of features, and is very stable. I’m not liking its slow syncing metadata which is annoying if you’ve a large music collection. The mouse support is particularly welcome.
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Responsive Design and Fluid Grids with these Lightweight Frameworks
A framework for the quick development of websites is a structure of files and folders of standardized code (HTML, CSS, JS documents, and more) which can be used as a reference to help approach and resolve new problems of a similar nature. By providing a common structure, frameworks offer developers the opportunity to reuse code and avoid starting projects from scratch.
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Roundup: Best Free Open Source BASIC Tools
BASIC (an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use.
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StingRay – simple chess graphical user interface
StingRay is a new entry in the field of Linux-based chess software. It’s billed as a simple chess graphical user interface with basic functionality to run against UCI and XBoard engines.
The software is designed to be lightweight and not burden the chess player with features they’ll never use.
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gPodder – podcast client written in Python
gPodder is an open source tool that downloads and manages free audio and video content (“podcasts”) for you. The software is written in Python and sports a simple GTK interface. The software package also includes a command-line interface which is called gpo. It lets you listen to podcasts on your computer or on mobile devices.
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Org mode – Life in Plain Text
Natural language processing (NLP) is an exciting field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. It includes word and sentence tokenization, text classification and sentiment analysis, spelling correction, information extraction, parsing, meaning extraction, and question answering.
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bat – super charged cat – my favorite colorizer
bat is a drop-in replacement for the cat command adding advanced syntax highlighting and Git integration to show file modifications. It’s a really useful utility that is a massive leap up from cat. bat’s written in the Rust programming language.
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flameshot – simple to use screenshot program
Being able to take a screenshot comes in handy so many times. Linux is blessed with a good range of competent screenshot software. One which has recently caught our attention is Flameshot, an easy to use, open source, Qt-based screenshot utility which is adept at capturing custom areas of a desktop.
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castero – command-line podcast player
If you’re tired of bloated GUI software and are looking for a capable podcast player, give castero a whirl. With a few more features, this podcast would tick all the boxes.
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Vocal – a modern Vala podcast player
This podcast tool has some really interesting features, but stability issues mean it’s impossible to recommend in its current state. But we’ll keep an eye on its development. If they can iron out the major bugs, this podcast player will be an interesting alternative.
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Review: The Binary Times Podcast
I recently authored a detailed review of the Linux podcast scene, grilling 25 podcasts targeted at Linux and open source enthusiasts. Like any roundup of this type, it’s almost inevitable that a few podcasts missed my radar. One of these is The Binary Times Podcast. Apologies to the hosts of the show.
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DocBook – markup language for technical documentation
DocBook is a semantic markup language for writing structured documents using XML (or SGML). It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation. The language is fairly easy to learn; its strength derives from its flexibility.
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googler: Google Web and Google News from the command-line
I love working with the command line. Seriously, I think there’s hardly anything more productive and versatile for a software developer than the terminal. Maybe it’s the hacker in me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a heavy user of graphical applications, but the terminal will always have a special place.
I’ve recently come across a command-line tool that’s right up my street. It’s called googler, an open source tool to Google from the command-line. It’s written in Python, so that ticks another box for me. googler isn’t affiliated to Google in any way.
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