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Textbook manifesto (2016)

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Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#31

Post by ChuckMcM »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #10
pcmonk wrote: post #3

A lot of people tend to harp on the "textbooks are too expensive" issue, and I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented. > If you can’t find one, write one. It’s not that hard. I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering t…

> Many students already do this. It's not uncommon for students to not buy a single textbook in a semester. I never bought a textbook unless I absolutely completely needed it. Otherwise I did anything possible to get it if I needed it before outright buying the book. In some cases just using Google was enough for the class. Especially for most of my programming courses. Textbooks are so expensive, and half of the tim…

I had a different experience in school, I kept the text book and re-read it. Eventually I had read every text book that I kept (although I did not keep them all) at least once and some of them several times. In my "first" senior year I discovered it was really useful to re-read a text book about a year after I had finished the class, apparently a lot of stuff had settled out by then and since it wasn't coming at me all new at that point I found it really helped me deepen my understanding of the topic generally.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#32

Post by lvh »

In many European countries, this problem was resolved by what I feel is mostly student pressure. Our student union (for lack of better word) owned printing equipment and worked with most professors to do exactly what's suggested in this article: most professors wrote their own books (not 140 pages, though). Most of my textbooks were between 2 and 7 EUR, which I'm led to believe is approximately at cost. Occasionally, a particular textbook was "recommended", but there would always be ample library copies available, and often you wouldn't _really_ need it. I'd have about 4-6 courses per semester, so I'd spend maybe 25-30 EUR on our own textbooks. Occasionally I'd have to shell out for a traditional textbook, and that would utterly dominate that semester's materials budget.

The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#33

Post by nebabyte »

sitkack wrote: post #23
pcmonk wrote: post #3

A lot of people tend to harp on the "textbooks are too expensive" issue, and I think this correctly identifies one of the problems: textbook price is not an issue to many professors. Unfortunately, there's no actual solution to that presented. > If you can’t find one, write one. It’s not that hard. I've used three or four textbooks written by my professor, and I can't say the quality was all that great. Considering t…

> there's no actual solution to that presented I think you missed this part > All of our books are available under free licenses that allow readers to copy and distribute the text; they are also free to modify it, which allows them to adapt the book to different needs, and to help develop new material. Along with the source to all the books, https://github.com/AllenDowney We need to find a way to make 100 more Allen…

> We need to find a way to make 100 more Allen Downeys

Well, as this reminds me of a discussion on here that illustrated why 'hopeless idealism' in the face of actual problems of market economics tends never to amount to much, the "answer" readily jumps to mind:

"Create a model for a market which rewards actors who behave similar to [Allen Downeys] and punishes those who do not, and migrate communities to instead use such a system."

Of course, it's a nontrivial (monumental, tbh) solution, but frankly, so is the problem it addresses - we'd have them solved if they weren't. Nonetheless, that is what is needed to 'solve' the problem (rather than merely sidestep it - though that could also be done as a non-lasting 'patch' solution).

Fortunately in this time of flux, few are confident in what "will" actually happen, and thus many are willing to try out new systems. Perhaps someone like you (or even you) will construct such a model in Ethereum or some other market platform which ends up being the dominant one in 20 years.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#35

Post by mwcampbell »

dharness wrote: post #4

While I agree with the content of this in general, I find books to be burdensome and would not like a course centered around them. I think a series of well crafted video lectures are a better medium for some people, myself included. I also find that I can learn everything I need to in my Software Engineering program via a series of pointed google searches much quicker than reading a text. Most courses have 1 or more…

On your suggestion about video lectures, remember that text is accessible to some people for whom video is not, particularly blind people and deaf people.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#36

Post by itchyjunk »

TheCowboy wrote: post #18
itchyjunk wrote: post #8

I was just thinking about asking HN about free books that will get me started in phython. This seems to have a quite a few [0]. Has HN read any of these or recommends anything in particular? (I went through learning python the hard way a few years back and have been slacking off) ---------------------------- [0] http://greenteapress.com/wp/

If you've done LPTHW, then it's more about deciding what you want to do with Python and finding something in that direction. Do you want to learn computer sciences basics? You might want a data structures book. Do you just want to continue to learn the language and standard libraries? Doug Hellman's The Python Standard Library by Example is a good reference. Statistics? Web development? It depends.

I actually wanted to get into ML (DL as you might have guessed). But I am not sure jumping into tensorflow or keras directly is good or bad.. But I just scanned through think python 2e and looks pretty good to me. This should keep me busy for now.

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#37

Post by jimmaswell »

itchyjunk wrote: post #8

I was just thinking about asking HN about free books that will get me started in phython. This seems to have a quite a few [0]. Has HN read any of these or recommends anything in particular? (I went through learning python the hard way a few years back and have been slacking off) ---------------------------- [0] http://greenteapress.com/wp/

Why would you want to learn a programming language from a book when there are so many free guides online, including python's official ones?

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#38

Post by dullroar »

teekee wrote: post #27

"If you can’t find one, write one." What would be the best way to write a free book please? Any pointers? Experience?

I wrote one last year. It started out as notes for a series of "lunch and learns" I was going to give at work. The notes just kept growing and growing, until over the course of a weekend I ended up sitting down and pounding out 200 pages of content. That was the easy part! The hard part was then learning how to build an effective index (harder than it sounds), coming up with examples and figures, tuning and tweaking, etc.

So, to recap my experience, I would suggest that you think of a topic about which you know enough to have something to say. Not just "pure knowledge," but real opinions founded in real-world experience. Pretend you're going to give a series of presentations, lectures or articles on the matter. Start typing up the notes, looking for organizational structure as you go. Keep typing. Reorganize as you go. Keep typing. At some point you'll realize you're on your way, then the momentum will start to carry you as you figure out to what "depth" you want to go. Don't edit at this point, just keep generating content.

When you think you're close, start "spiraling" back through the book, editing, cleaning, editing, adding, editing...If the material deserves an index, go read up on that (again, it is NOT just a cross-reference of non-trivial words!) Somewhere around now hand it out to some friends to read. Incorporate their feedback. Edit again.

Look! You've written a book! :)

Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)

#40

Post by tzs »

cbgb wrote: post #17
rocqua wrote: post #9

For high-level math courses, the best I've seen is a reader written by the professor, combined with an optional 1000 page tome. The reader goes with the lectures, and is focused on the actual material of the course. The reader, combined with your notes, basically covers the lectures. Meanwhile, if you need another take on the material, or some wider context, the 1000 page tome is always there. This works especially w…

To add a different but orthogonal perspective to this: My higher-level math courses were pure mathematics courses, and we pretty much always used Springer textbooks, which were only a few hundred pages long and the size of a normal paperback (i.e., not the size of, say, CLRS). When we didn't use Springer textbooks, we used other textbooks similar in size and length (e.g., [0]). I found these textbooks to be completel…

Isn't part of that due to math being quite dense? What I mean by dense is that a small amount of mathematics can express things that will take a long time to understand. Because of the density you don't need a lot of pages to contain enough material to occupy a student for a whole semester.

For subjects that are less dense, you need bigger books.

For instance all of the required and recommended books from the courses I took as part of getting a bachelor's degree in math from Caltech take less space on my bookshelf than the required books from just my first semester of law school.

Toss in the second semester of law school and include the non-required books I bought, and that would bring it to more shelf space than all the recommended and required books I bought for all the science and engineering classes I took in four years at Caltech.

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