101–110 of 161 posts
I work for Akamai Technologies and the author I am talking about is Frank Thomson Leighton.
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You're the type of professor everyone wishes they had. That's so phenomenal you're looking out for your students like this. That and if you end up writing supplementary material for the book.
Is it an American thing to force your students to buy textbooks? In Britain (at least at the universities that I know about) there tends to be 2 or 3 recommended texts, of which the library will have several copies, and they're meant for reference when you get stuck rather than learning the entire course.
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$280??!! I knew prices were "high", but good grief! I guess I really am out of touch. Glad I held onto my vintage copy. Don't imagine the intervening 20-ish years have added circa $200 (at a guess) of value to the latest edition.
Textbook prices and college costs in general are amongst the most notable products outpacing inflation.
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In some sorts of code, you can get a lot of mileage from "loop invariants" and "loop variants". Understanding these is more or less the same as understanding proof by induction. Whether you are missing anything depends on whether you ever write the sort of code that benefits from this. (Even if you do, you still might not be missing anything. You might be comfortable with loop invariants but not have connected them w…
I'm afraid you're not very good at explaining yourself, I've no idea what point you're trying to make. Sorry to burst your bubble, but any moderately complex LOB CRUD app usually has a large amount of far more complex algos than a binary sort. Your off-hand comment shows a total ignorance of what's involved in writing a LOB CRUD web app. In my experience, algos are the really easy part of programming. The hard part i…
His point is that when you design an algorithm you need to be able to reason about why it works.
Based on the rest of your comments in this thread, it sounds to me like you have something against the mathematical background of CS? Writing code is not the same thing as doing computer science. Plenty of people are perfectly happy doing the former, but CS as an academic discipline is rooted in discrete math so any school that teaches it should also teach the background.
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Yes. But why people buy books is what I don't understand. At least for college and if it's not something you want to own for the future. Throughout most of my semesters I just rented the books. Much cheaper than buying.
It really is a shame that this is a rational solution. University text books should be material to get back to later in life, when confronted with a related problem. Part of university education should be a complete book shelf of well-understood books. This just exemplifies the new nature of university education: An ephemeral experience where the most durable result is debt /cynisism.
There are a few exceptions, of course, which is why I said that buying books that one wants to keep for the future (and also reference it in the future) is fine.
But should I really buy books for general education that I have to take and has nothing to do with my major?
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Yes. But why people buy books is what I don't understand. At least for college and if it's not something you want to own for the future. Throughout most of my semesters I just rented the books. Much cheaper than buying.
I saw some information the other day which suggested that books can with access codes for online material (tests/exams etc) which was required for the course. The other perspective is that if tuition is many thousands of dollars a year, then the cost may be not that dramatic.
In a science major, if you take 4 classes every semester and then you assume that each book costs $250, then that's $1000 right there every semester. That money can be spent for rent and other more high priority stuff.
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It's helpful for truly understanding recursion.
If it's so useful for "truly" understanding it, why do I have to show so many CS educated juniors how to use recursion? Have to point out to them to use it instead of doing crazy nested loops or other stupid solutions to a problem simply solved using recursion? Given that I obviously don't "truly" understand it, having never done a CS degree. I'd posit that most CS students don't truly understand recursion, they just…
While "juniors" = employees subordinate to you & "so many "juniors"" = high turnover & you = positive senior employee & college educated graduates = smart: "posit that most CS students don't truly understand recusion" = False '''Smart, being distinct from intelligent, indicates a propensity to make decisions that maximize benefit for the person described as smart. A smart CS student would work for a company that valued intellectual capital instead of a company with high turnover.'''
While "juniors" = employees subordinate to you & "so many "juniors"" = hyperbole & you = positive senior employee: "posit that most CS students don't truly understand recusion" = False '''It is dubious that more than 171.5k CS graduates worked subordinate to you from 2004-2010, or that an unbiased sample of CS graduates from 2004-2010 worked subordinate to you (see previous While "loop") [1] .'''
The proof that the previous comment's posit is not provable follows by induction.
Note_0: While loops can use "&" or "and" operators in some languages without nested loops (unless the programmer chooses to implement a break line) to achieve much of the effect of recursive functions. While statements, as implemented in the example above, offer nearly as much access to the input stack as recursive functions; about equal risk of an infinite loop; and don't risk stack overflow.
Note_1: I have a bachelors in Math. So, I was likely taught a more substantial "theoretical basis," and less "practical skill" than the curriculum most CS graduates were taught.
[1]: http://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sci...
This document is over 900 pages. How long are you supposed to take to read and understand all of this? And is this really all necessary? On the surface this looks like an insurmountable task with questionable benefits. Don't get me wrong, but in the past 6 years of casual and professional programming, I've needed only a basic understanding of math, the most difficult thing being collision detection in games, and that…
A computer programmer who understands the mathematical underpinnings of his work might replace the standard library implementation of HashMap with one that's better suited to his use case, or do his own derivations to figure out how to implement back-propagation in a neural network, etc.
No, it's not a perfect analogy, but the point stands I think - having the deep knowledge of the theory and foundations in any field enables you to push the boundaries beyond any "black box" that is provided to you.
This is so stupid, the "primer on the basics" should be "Algorithmization for Computer Science", not a 900+ page math textbook (that doesn't even explore graph theory, calculus and differential calculus).
Read the TOC again, there's plenty of graph theory. Calculus isn't important for CS.
It can be, depending on what you're doing. Look at back-propagation in neural networks for example, where the whole thing is based on the chain rule from Calculus.
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I appreciate your practical comments. This particular caught my eye: >"Previously I used Epp's book [1] which in my opinion is an outstanding book but regrettably is $280.44." This is extortionate. What is the justification for a book being priced at nearly $300? This is one book of how many a student will need that semester? Are school's getting a piece of this as well? Is this why such a racket is permitted? Sorry…
> This is extortionate. What is the justification for a book being priced at nearly $300? This is one book of how many a student will need that semester? Are school's getting a piece of this as well? Is this why such a racket is permitted? That is a bit high for textbooks, most textbooks are usually "only" in the realm of $80-160. That said, math textbooks are usually far more expensive than others. The excuse given…
Right, and couldn't they make up for this by issuing e-Textbooks with lower prices that would much higher volume in terms of sales?
Also I believe the book stores themselves are in this farce, as large percentage of the bookstores are not run by the schools but private companies such as Barnes and Noble and Follet[1]. So they are making out in this scheme as well.
[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/textbook-publishers-going-aft...