Geeksforgeeks as Books

Note

Complete books are located in the book branch.

Books will be updated regularly to keep up with Geeksforgeeks.org.

Geeksforgeeks.org has (finally) updated its user interface lately and optimized for mobile devices. This project started when the old geeksforgeeks site was clumsy.

Books

New: Complete books are located in the book branch

Note: Books in the master branch is not actively updated and maintained anymore. Instead get the books in the book branch. The book branch will be merged into the master branch in the future. The code in the master branch was hacked together when I just got to know Scrapy and lxml. So fair warning, it's not pretty if you decide to take a look at the code.

Old: To get the latest version of the books, look under the directory called goodies. Each book under geeksforgeeks-books is generated with articles under a tag/category on geeksforgeeks.org. The book under leetcode-book is generated from the articles on leetcode.com.

App

There is an App now! Geeksforgeeks Reader makes it easier to read on your iOS devices. This app just got started. Feature requests are welcome.

For people who use leetcode, there is an app as well: Leetcoder.

Tools

If you want to generate the books yourself. Here is an incomplete guide.

Requirements

1. install Scrapy. It's is used to download webpages from geeksforgeeks and leetcode. It follows the next page link and downloads webpages.

   Install it with pip install scrapy. I created two separate scrapy projects called geeksforgeeks and leetcode to download wepages from the sites.

2. lxml and Boilerpipy (or BeautifulSoup). After downloading the html files, you need to extract the articles from them, I'm using Boilerpipy because it can handle webpages with different layout. But if you are only interested in the geeksforgeeks site, you can just use lxml to extract the articles. It will probably be faster too.

   Boilerpipy also removes the title of an article sometimes. So I had to do some post-processing with lxml after to add the title back.

3. Pandoc. It's used to convert html files or markdown files to epub, pdf and docx format files. The latex engine used in Pandoc can't handle gif images so only a few pdf books have been generated so far.

4. kindlegen is needed to generate mobi files for reading on Kindle or the Kindle App.

5. WordCloud. The book covers are generated with wordcloud with a bit of meta in mind.

How To

1. Crawling with Scrpay. Go to the geeksforgeeks subdirectory and run commands like scrapy crawl geeksforgeeks -a category=category -a name=name.

   For example, running scrapy crawl geeksforgeeks -a category=tag -a name=pattern-searching will crawl from the page http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/tag/pattern-searching/. category and name are two arguments the spider takes. On geeksforgeeks, things can be organized by tag or category. Specify the category/tag and the name, Scrapy will do the rest for you.

2. Generate a book. Now go into the geeksforgeeks-books subdirectory and you should be able to find a directory called pattern-searching. Now run python generate_book.py pattern-searching 1.0. It will clean the html files, concatenate the cleaned files into one html file, then use pandoc to create an epub and pdf format files from the it. In the end a mobi file is created using kindlegen.

To Do

Style the books

Style the books better. Those books are essentially styled via css. Therefore styling <pre> and <code>, for instance, will style the code of the epub books.

Generate pdf format books

Convert gif images to png and use them instead so pandoc can handle them.

Contribute

Book

Every tag or category on geeksforgeeks.org can be turned into a book. So you are welcome to add/suggest more books.

Style

The style for generating epub books is under styles subdirectory. epub books are styled via css. Welcome to submit your stylesheets.

License

The content in the books doesn't belong to me. I created the books so that I can read them offline on iPad or Kindle, and (hopefully) for a better reading experience.

The content on geeksforgeeks.org is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 India. See the license here.

The copyright of the content on leetcode belongs to the site and its owner.

The code in this project is licensed under Apache License, version 2.0. See the license here.

Authors

Jing Zhou, gnijuohz at gmail.com.
LinkedIn
Twitter

Contributors

@lebshah

Issues

You can report issue right here.