The Princeton Bitcoin Textbook Is Now Free Online

Image by Jason Ben­jamin, via Flickr Com­mons

On the Free­dom to Tin­ker blog, Arvind Narayanan, a com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton, announced yes­ter­day:

The first com­plete draft of the Prince­ton Bit­coin text­book is now freely avail­able. We’re very hap­py with how the book turned out: it’s com­pre­hen­sive, at over 300 pages, but has a con­ver­sa­tion­al style that keeps it read­able.

If you’re look­ing to tru­ly under­stand how Bit­coin works at a tech­ni­cal lev­el and have a basic famil­iar­i­ty with com­put­er sci­ence and pro­gram­ming, this book is for you. Researchers and advanced stu­dents will find the book use­ful as well — start­ing around Chap­ter 5, most chap­ters have nov­el intel­lec­tu­al con­tri­bu­tions.

Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press is pub­lish­ing the offi­cial, peer-reviewed, pol­ished, and pro­fes­sion­al­ly done ver­sion of this book. It will be out this sum­mer. If you’d like to be noti­fied when it comes out, you should sign up here.

The Prince­ton Bit­coin text­book is already being used in Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty class­rooms (includ­ing at Stan­ford) and it’s also the text that sup­ports a Prince­ton Bit­coin course being taught on Cours­era.

You can now find it added to our col­lec­tion of Free Text­books.

via Boing­Bo­ing

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Harvard’s Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Course Teach­es You to Code in 12 Weeks

Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: A Free Online Course from Prince­ton