Technical Audio Books - Where Are The Good Ones?

Gverig asks: "Are any good audio (CD) books for developers, engineers or just geeks. These can be lectures on programming concepts, introductions to systems, best practices, ethics, or even funny stories ala Dilbert. What audio books do you have that help you sharpen your technical skills and improve yourself as a professional?"

Comments

Audio Books Online

[NaNO2x]

Well for some legal audio books that you can download, I have found http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/ which isn't the best but it does have some good stuff, I would love to know any other good free audiobook sites. But If you want to then there are always torrents for audiobooks. I'm sure there are many things out there and hopefully most of the good stuff is free.

University of Washington's presentations

[Will Sargent]

My biggest technical find (although video rather than audio) has to be the University of Washington's CSE Colloquia. These are videos of presentations done in the University, and they are pure content gold. Given by people who know exactly what they're doing, and a focus on real technical complexity rather than hype.

http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayseries.asp?col lid=485

IT Conversations

[FLEB]

http://www.itconversations.com/ is about the best I've found along these lines.

Keep an eye on Podcasts. Most of the technical shows I've found on there are just a gloss-over, but something good has to come around sooner or later.

Podcast..

[SteveX]

It's not a book, but it's a fairly technical podcast, something there don't seem to be a lot of. Geared to developers.

http://www.codesermon.org/

Podcasts

[Noksagt]

As others have mentioned, Podcasts are the way to go. Here are good ones:

• IT Conversations has IT-related conferences, interviews, round-tables, and more.
• Science Friday is the weekly NPR segment, with science interviews, news, and discussion.
• This Week in Science is college radio at it's finest. Informative and funny.

There are, of course, many other programs I haven't been able to listen to yet. Learn of others at ipodder.org or the various other podcast directories that have sprung up.

Feynman Lectures. All of them.

[Noksagt]

Hopefully most geeks know of the late, great physicist, Richard Feynman. In addition to coming up with QED, helping to make the A-bomb, winning a nobel prize, and figuring out why the Challenger blew-up, he gave lectures to college freshmen on physics. They're great. The books are often suggested texts, but it is a treat to hear them in his voice. I bought mine on audio-tape and pain-stakingly recorded them on my PC to dump onto CDs. Thankfully, official CDs have started to trickle out.

Vol 1-2 are on Quantum Mechanics. 3-4 covers crystal structure, electricity, and magnetism. 5-6 goes through energy, motion, kinetics, and heat. 7-8 does classical and relativistic mechanics (and gravity and a bit more electromagnetism). More should be coming. I think they are up to volume 20 of the tape sets. Each volume has about six chapters from the books. I think there are 129 chapters all-told.

Podcasts

[eyeball]

There are a few development Podcasts emerging. One includes my favorite on Java called zdot

Someone else already mentioned , but it's worth recommending again.

Guido van Rossum on Python

[rjnagle]

ITCoversations.com is the obvious answer to your question.

I just listened to 2 talks by Guido van Rossum about python
See here and here .

Believe it or not, I heard part of it while shopping at Walmart.

Truthfully though, aside from journalistic coverage of new technology, it's very difficult to present technical information via audio (though not impossible).

Actually, I'm a little surprised that The Teaching Company (the company that produces those college classes on tape) haven't tried any technical classes.