I'm thinking of writing a ebook that I can use for teaching a course. I would like to see examples of well written textbooks. Are there good examples?
Textbook manifesto (2016)
141–150 of 166 posts
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#142I'm thinking of writing a ebook that I can use for teaching a course. I would like to see examples of well written textbooks. Are there good examples?
I had 3 beginning stats books and they were all terrible. I used "statistics for the utterly confused" and it helped click everything together with about 1000 less pages.
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#143A 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…
I'd say about 2/3s of my professors in the 90s used huge copy packets you'd buy in addition to textbooks.
My wife got the same degrees 15-20 years later (finance/economics), her courses (at what's now ranked as a "higher" rated university) were the equivalent to what I had in high school.
This wouldn't really have been an issue but when she went to graduate school, it's on par (difficulty wise) with the 90s. So the gap she had to make up was extraordinary.
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#144I'm thinking of writing a ebook that I can use for teaching a course. I would like to see examples of well written textbooks. Are there good examples?
Anything by Kernighan/Pike/Ritchie such as The C Programming Language, The Unix Programming Environment and gopl.io book are all concise and well written books with just exactly the right amount of material it seems. Paolo Aluffi's Algebra Chapter 0 is a good math text as a math example for something that is more than just dumping propositions/theorems and proofs.
I liked this draft book as an algorithms book example http://www.parallel-algorithms-book.com/
MIT's course notes are good as brief material that compliments the lectures https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
Knuth also labels the difficulties of each problem set in his books like Concrete Math, something I wish more authors did. Concrete Math is also a good example of a well written and engaging math book accessible to a motivated highschool student.
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get the tools necessary to secure and maintain sufficient initial and recurring quantities of material assets; jobs with sufficiently high pay do that (but not all jobs have sufficiently high pay), though they aren't the only thing that could. > Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators. No, jobs are creat…
Different jobs have different levels of net benefit to society. For example, paying someone to "dig a ditch and fill it in" gives that person work, but is a zero-sum game - transferring wealth between people, but not increasing the total pie (total well-being), at least without considering the psychological benefits of work (and exercise!). Similarly, breaking windows to create jobs for window repairmen creates jobs,…
A lot of evidence seems to point towards the best way being a combination of the two.
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Italian, and fellow european here. When I started university (1999, I think) there were still plenty of Big Expensive Books (I recall my Chemistry one was like that). The "student pressure" materialized in the form of doing illegal copies of the books. This used to be totally illegal, but incredibly easy. At some point the legislative environment changed so that photocopying up to a decent percentage of the books was…
In the US it feels to me like it's gone the opposite way. The textbook publishers are increasingly able to block people from using pirated books, or even buying used books, by including one-use online codes in the books. Then they can raise the prices because there's no other market. Don't ask me what I think the punishment should be, for devising this system, or for a professor requiring the use of such a thing in a…
My wife works for a major textbook publisher. Not all those free textbooks or cheap textbooks are the same quality as the ones produced by big evil corporations. Frequently, when looking at competitors books, she will find more typos, fewer citations, out of date studies with small sample sizes, poor quality graphics, and sometimes just wrong information. Big books are expensive because the companies frequently worry a lot about these things and also spend lots of effort on the pedagogy of the text.
However, management is not good, the commercial model frequently prioritizes things which are not good for students, and the industry is still shedding revenue. In an effort to change that, they seems to be doubling down on digital products, which are still less popular than print by several orders of magnitude.
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the biggest job creators is the government, with their massive budget and public needs. Yet we are often lead to believe that we need to coddle billionaires so that they feel comfortable enough to lay a few more jobs, and starve the federal government of revenue and responsibility.
Indeed. The government, like poor people, spend every dollar they take in, which allows that money to circulate. To use a cliche, a billionaire can only buy so many yachts, pieces of art or gold bricks; at some point, the excess is going to land in an offshore account or otherwise be underutilized. Billionaires grudgingly create jobs.
Every dollar given to the billionaire is willingly given because the product benefits the person at least a dollar (net benefit to both parties). "The excess" is invested in other companies that produce other things people are willing to pay for.
Every dollar the government spends was taken from a taxpayer (cost one dollar), to provide a product people are not willing to pay a dollar for. This yields a net loss to society, unless there are positive externalities.
This does not mean that there is not a role for government spending (a "common good" in the economic sense is undervalued in the market).
Voluntary exchange produces an economic surplus, increasing net well-being. Government (compulsory) spending hopes to create an economic surplus, but is largely not measurable.
Sometimes the aim of government spending is simply transfer of wealth, which is zero-sum (or maybe negative sum, if it damages incentives to produce, or maybe positive sum if the recipients can use it to greater net benefit). Again, hard to measure.
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being opposed by elected officials is one thing. What truly baffles me is being opposed by the very people that are adversely affected. Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!?
Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!? In the US, poor people don't see themselves as poor. They see themselves as not-yet-rich (or, at least, not-yet-middle-class). Therefore people oppose taxes on "the rich" because they think that those taxes might one-day affect them, even if that expectation is unrealistic in…
> In the US, poor people don't see themselves as poor. They see themselves as not-yet-rich
This is repeated so much that I'm starting to distrust it...
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah and one of them decided to venture into book writing, had connections and was friends with other professors... That's one way to sell that pig lipsticks. Edit: And incorrect about department = array(Professors)
That still doesn't make sense. If a department had a professor notable enough to write a textbook in a particular area, wouldn't they be teaching that course themselves? Rather than pressuring the other professor who is teaching it to use their book?
MATH courses typically have large student count, thus needing multiple professors and sections.
BTW, What I said is anecdotal.
Re: Textbook manifesto (2016)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get the tools necessary to secure and maintain sufficient initial and recurring quantities of material assets; jobs with sufficiently high pay do that (but not all jobs have sufficiently high pay), though they aren't the only thing that could. > Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators. No, jobs are creat…
Different jobs have different levels of net benefit to society. For example, paying someone to "dig a ditch and fill it in" gives that person work, but is a zero-sum game - transferring wealth between people, but not increasing the total pie (total well-being), at least without considering the psychological benefits of work (and exercise!). Similarly, breaking windows to create jobs for window repairmen creates jobs,…
> The best way we've found to increase total well-being is to allow people to pay for what they want, rather than having government mandate jobs to be done.
The widespread unrest with classical, 19th Century, capitalism and it's displacement throughout the developed world with modern mixed economies is a direct result of the untruth of this claim.