What is free-programming-books-search?

This project is a search tool built as a companion to the free-programming-books collection, which is a large community maintained list of free programming books and learning resources. The search tool lets you find books by title or author and filter results by language, giving that big list a faster way to browse than scrolling through a long markdown page. There is no traditional database behind the scenes. Instead, the list of books lives as a text file in Markdown format on the main free-programming-books site. A separate automated process, described in the README as free-programming-books-parser, parses that file once a day and produces a single JSON data file called fpb.json. The search tool downloads that file into your browser and runs all searches locally from there, so no server queries are needed once the page has loaded and you start typing. Because the index is refreshed only once per day, a book added to the main collection may take up to 24 hours to show up in search results here. The README is explicit that this delay is a deliberate design choice rather than a bug, and answers this exact question directly in its FAQ section. To run the project on your own computer you need Node.js installed, then you clone the repository, run a few npm commands to install dependencies including react-scripts, and start a local development server. The site then opens in your browser at a localhost address. Deploying your own copy to GitHub Pages is also supported, through a documented sequence involving a git remote, installing gh-pages, and a single npm run deploy command.