141–150 of 161 posts
This fall I will be teaching the required "Discrete Math for CS course" to about fifty students at the University of South Carolina. Previously I used Epp's book [1] which in my opinion is an outstanding book but regrettably is $280.44. Many of our students are working minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and I don't want to make them pay so much if I can at all help it. Lucky I saw this!! I do have one reservation t…
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> In my experience, algos are the really easy part of programming. 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 C…
Ah, the old "but it's not a programming degree, it's about theory". I thought we were past that these days. Notice how it took you just one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote. We've a fairly big problem in this industry that "qualified" CS graduates don't actually signal anything about their suitability for the profession. A significant chunk can't even fizzbuzz. I'd suggest teaching mathematical mo…
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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.
Lots of instructors assign from books without reproducing the problems for students without books. Hence, it's typically required to have a book for a class. US University libraries will typically have copies of all textbooks used in any university class. Whether or not they have enough copies at any given time is another issue.
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> In my experience, algos are the really easy part of programming. 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 C…
Ah, the old "but it's not a programming degree, it's about theory". I thought we were past that these days. Notice how it took you just one sentence to summarise the few hundred words he wrote. We've a fairly big problem in this industry that "qualified" CS graduates don't actually signal anything about their suitability for the profession. A significant chunk can't even fizzbuzz. I'd suggest teaching mathematical mo…
Oh, come on. What sornaensis's one sentence summarizes is ... the one sentence at the start of my comment. It's true that his is shorter; it also gives less information.
(For the avoidance of doubt, that isn't a problem. Since you declared yourself unable to understand what I wrote, it's fair enough to try to simplify it.)
The rest of what I wrote was (1) an answer to your subsidiary question "What am I missing?" plus (2) an explanation of what I was talking about, in case it was stuff you weren't familiar with.
(Of course if I'd known you'd respond as unpleasantly as you did, I wouldn't have bothered trying to be helpful. But at the time I thought you might well be asking a sincere question rather than just wanting to vent about how out of touch those hoity-toity theoreticians are.)
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Again I was responding to your comment: >"The justift for its price is that the market will bear it." The market will bear it and the market has no choice to bear it are two different things. I have not "rationalized" anything.
> The market will bear it and the market has no choice to bear it are two different things. With textbooks, there is a choice: go without (either taking the class anyway or not.) That your perceived cost from going without is higher than the cost of paying for the book is, arguably a sign that the book is priced correctly for value. You seem to think that the book "ought" to be priced by cost to produce as they would…
>"You seem to think that the book "ought" to be priced by cost to produce as they would be in a perfectly competitive market"
Nowhere did I articulate that sentiment at all. There is plenty of room to make a tidy profit without resorting to punitive pricing, even in a captive market.
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That's the received wisdom, yeah. The party line etc etc. I am not so sure though. One has to factor in the possibility and ease of losing the device, or rights to the content that I have backed up on the cloud. Way too many people have the ability to intervene between me and the content. I appreciate the convenience of not having to move shit ton of bleached and pulped wood, but then I have to worry less about DRM,…
None of the books in my electronic library comes with DRM ;-)
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I'm not very mathematical, and I was much less mathematical when I worked that book (calc 1, not calc 2 yet, etc). I found it highly accessible and fun to work through. The concepts are all well-explained and I don't recall anything that would be out of reach for someone with some probability and foundations in classical logic. If they are at discrete math, this book is well withing their reach. It doesn't teach hard…
I am interested in which book you are referring to, the Book on Amazon Op lined too or the MIT material linked in this thread ?
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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.
This fall I will be teaching the required "Discrete Math for CS course" to about fifty students at the University of South Carolina. Previously I used Epp's book [1] which in my opinion is an outstanding book but regrettably is $280.44. Many of our students are working minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and I don't want to make them pay so much if I can at all help it. Lucky I saw this!! I do have one reservation t…
Maybe this would be a better first couple of weeks introduction:
http://bookboon.com/en/gentle-introduction-to-mathematics-fo...
More information about BookBoon:
http://bookboon.com/blog/en/bookboon-com/our-mission-and-concept/
http://bookboon.com/blog/en/bookboon-com/about-the-concept-and-books/
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> 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…
I spent a little time working at Pearson on a textbook project, and yeah, they're pretty profitable, but the up-front costs are enormous. The production budget for the biology book I worked on was $10 million. And that was for a book that would be widely used at the high-school level. For a math book like this, I'd guess they spent more like a million getting it done. I wouldn't be surprised if it was $50-100K just f…
So I don't believe the reason for "the production budget".
These "International Edition" usually marked by something "Not allowed in USA" slogan.