Network Flow Algorithms companion site offers free e-book — with strings attached

Companion site and download

A new companion website for David P. Williamson’s Network Flow Algorithms (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is live, and it has been reported that an electronic-only edition of the book is available for download directly from the site with the publisher’s permission. The site presents the full scope of the graduate text — maximum flows, minimum-cost flows, generalized and multicommodity flows, global minimum cuts, and the recent surge of work on electrical flows — and explicitly limits downloads to one copy per user for personal use. Free? Yes. Free-for-all? Not so much.

Why it matters

Network flow theory quietly underpins a lot of the software and science around us — from routing goods and data to image segmentation in computer vision, and even the classic “has my baseball team been eliminated?” problem (hello Moneyball!). This book stitches together decades of combinatorial algorithms and some recent advances into a single, concise reference. Want the math behind the models that help power modern ML pipelines and graph-based analyses? This is a clear stop on your reading list.

Course materials, errata and rules

Williamson also teaches an ORIE course at Cornell (ORIE 6330) based on the book; it has been reported that lecture videos and a syllabus are linked from the site, which is handy for learners who want classroom context. The page promises an errata sheet when available and invites corrections to bugs@networkflowalgs.com. Note the legal fine print: one personal copy only, redistribution requires Cambridge’s permission (rights@cambridge.org), and the site lists Copyright ©2026 — free access, yes; free-for-everything, no.

Sources: networkflowalgs.com, Hacker News