Free Python Books Went Viral on Hacker News

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Update

18 Apr 2021. Since I published the post the GitHub repository rocketed to 1.8K stars, 195 forks, and 44K views from 23K visitors. The repository is now the top Google search result for free python books. Mind-blowing, thanks all.

My Free Python Books list went viral on Hacker News, ending up on the home page within the first 2-3 entries for several hours.

Free Python Books on the home page of Hacker News
Free Python Books on the home page of Hacker News.

Mike Andreuzza shared the project’s link to Hacker News on April 10, 2021. Since then the post gathered 154 upvotes. The Free Python Books GitHub repository jumped to almost 700 stars and 80 forks (up from about 95 stars and 20 forks before), reached almost 15K views from over 8K visitors, and went trending on GitHub.

This attention brought new contributions to the project as 3 authors submitted their books and another user reported a broken link. Two people even sent me donations (thanks for the coffee!).

Plot of the views and unique visitors of Free Python Books on GitHub when featured on Hacker News
A plot of the views (green) and unique visitors (blue) of the Free Python Books GitHub repository when the project was featured on Hacker News.

Although I had interacted online with Mike a number of times, his submission to Hacker News came out of the blue and was a complete, pleasant surprise for me.

Free Python Books is a project I began when first approaching the language. Books are my preferred learning resources, so I started maintaining a list of the many good free works I run across.

Curation is another learning tool and the list is also a reference source for me.

My deepest thanks to Mike and the many users who appreciate the project. If you haven’t already, check out Free Python Books.

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