
Textbook manifesto (2016) - Tomte
http://greenteapress.com/wp/textbook-manifesto/
======
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.

~~~
jabl
As a fellow European, my experience is similar (though our prices were higher
but still substantially lower than the big-name commercial publishers.), but I
suspect it would never fly in the US (communism, boo!).

~~~
a3n
Having been a US citizen for all of my 60 years, and often wondering "why
things so f __ked up? ", I've come to understand or believe this about the US:

If it makes money, it's good, regardless of whether it's good or bad for
people or the environment. Once something is making money, it becomes a god-
given right (cheap labor, insurance companies as health-care middlemen, etc).

If you propose something that inhibits the above, you will be opposed with all
available resources by elected members of government at every level. That
_people_ are the ones suffering and electing is a mystery that I don't think I
have enough remaining years to understand.

~~~
taeric
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!?

~~~
supremesaboteur
Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Jobs are created by
incentivizing job creators.

~~~
tbrownaw
_Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs._

1) A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work:
[https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-
poor/2014/home.htm](https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-
poor/2014/home.htm)

2) Reducing poverty can work by either raising the baseline (stronger social
safety net, maybe higher minimum wage, better overall vocational education,
etc) or by moving individuals into other economic classes (getting people
(better) jobs). I think raising the baseline is probably a better approach,
since it works by not leaving people behind.

~~~
michaelmrose
"A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work"

This sentence is not wrong but a casual reading of it would nearly always give
the wrong impression. Herein "poor people" is defined as the people below the
federal poverty limit. For one person this is around 12000 dollars.

A more common sense colloquial definition of poor is those barely scraping by
based on the cost of living in their area of residence. In most of those
considered poor by that broader definition someone in the household is
working. Remember that not all families have both partners working.

Your perhaps too brief post would inspire people to think that most people by
the common sense definition of poor are in fact unemployed which is not
correct.

------
pcmonk
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 that the set of professors who
currently choose to write their own textbooks probably skews toward professors
who are good at writing textbooks, I'm not super high on this plan.

> Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50,
> don’t buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don’t read it. There’s just no
> excuse for bad books.

Many students already do this. It's not uncommon for students to not buy a
single textbook in a semester. In fact, the professors that do care about
textbook price generally make textbooks optional. It turns out that's a lot
easier than writing your own textbook and somehow selling it for cheap.

~~~
sitkack
> 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](https://github.com/AllenDowney)

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

~~~
arcticfox
Fortunately, from first-hand experience, Allen is churning them out himself in
the form of students. He's a truly amazing professor, so while not exact, the
clones are effective.

Many of his students are even involved in education in some way (incl. me, I
make software for university bookstores).

------
TheCowboy
I agree with the main point that students should read and understand
textbooks. But disagree with some assumptions and points.

1\. Many textbooks are written to be understood, but they vary a lot by field
and class level. Generally, I think lower level textbooks best meet Downey's
standards.

As you get into what is junior/senior (300-400 level) classes, there is not
always a neat textbook available.

2\. I disagree with 10 pages per week per course. I think the expectations of
what students can read per week are too low. I attended a couple different
schools, and one has a reputation of having high expectations of students, and
most students tend to rise up to the challenge. I think most professors don't
expect enough, and what a degree represents is watered down.

I do feel strongly that busywork and pointless readings should be avoided.
Pages per week should not be some sort of metric for learning, but 10 well-
written information-rich pages a week per course is not usually going to be a
challenge.

Nationally, most students don't even read much of what is assigned, so telling
students to not read a book if it has 500 pages won't change the status quo.

3\. The idea that writing a textbook is easy is crazy. Even if you ignore the
other requirements put upon professors, it is time-consuming to do it right.
Even short niche books, think O'Reilly type stuff, take time to produce.

~~~
maus42
10 pages a week _might_ be fine and well in a mathematics course and related
fields, as it's a field famously characterized by it's use of a concise
notation. You can state lots of things in a 10 pages. You can spend several
hours working with a proof that you can fit on one page. The softcover edit of
Rudin's _Real and complex analysis_ is a small book of 400 pages, and and is
supposed to a full-year course.

What about a less-mathematical course, say, history or philosophy? Well, lots
of depends how dense and difficult the text is, and how many courses the
student is assumed to be taking the same time.

But on the other hand, looking the bare page count, that's not much higher
than the reading assignments we had when I was in high school (Finland, 00s),
and there I was absolutely bored with the slow pace and had enough free time
to read approx. 1 - 1.5 full-length / short-ish novels in a week. (edit. in
retrospect, this feels like an overestimate, but I also read the Potters in
less than 48 hours / one weekend when they were published, so maybe not.)
Because the article mentions "professors", this is supposed to be about
university level students: the selected few who actually are academic inclined
and moreover, have chosen their field of study out of their free will. I have
habit of reading books on my daily commute train trip, most recently
Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_ : I average around 4-5 pages per 20-30
minute trip. I'm mediocre student in internationally mediocre university, so I
assume my mental faculties are not exceptionally high.

If there's is a problem of students simply not being able to find enough time
to study (because they are working 2 jobs), this is an external problem which
is not solved by changing curriculum but introducing financial support. If the
problem is that students are not _willing_ to find time to study preferring
other activities, this is a problem solved by having different students.

------
ziikutv
Its funny. This was my exact shower thought this morning.

I find books overly verbose, and too formal. I do not think there is a need to
dumb-down technical content. I also disagree with having a page limit as it
would likely lead to omission of topics that might be otherwise useful.

I think the publishing industry has to change or be weeded out by self-
publishers and video makers. I have learned many topics of my courses through
Slide decks and Youtube videos to avoid reading.

My plan was to start re-learning everything from Uni and write informal
tutorial (snippets) of blog posts about the topics and perhaps compiling to a
open source book. I'll keep you guys posted so you folks can blindly upvote my
fancy submission titles =D

Addendum: I'd really like to pug Brian Douglas' Youtube playlists on Control
Theory. AMAZING. Got an A thanks to him.

------
esfandia
I just implemented the reading quiz idea this term, and I thought that it went
really well. Give the students a manageable chunk of reading material (in my
case, the material came from various sources, not a single textbook), and give
them an offline quiz to test their reading comprehension. The quizzes were
graded by a TA, but the weight was quite small; small enough not to matter if
they cheated (and cheating won't help them in the final exam. Aside: is it
cheating if they didn't read the material but just hunted for the answers by
skimming?) but enough to provide extra incentive to read.

In class we go over the answers to the quiz. I don't post the answers (the TA
will have provided them the feedback they need when grading); rather we make
it an interactive session. I answer questions the students have, we go over
examples, I supplement the reading with slides if need be. Effectively, a
flipped classroom.

This was done more out of necessity: first time teaching the course, no proper
textbook (and in a quickly changing tech landscape for the topic at hand),
lack of confidence in my own understanding of the material (I also tried
gathering student questions beforehand so I could investigate them offline and
come to class prepared to answer them), but now I think I'm going to stick to
this way of teaching this course in the next installment next year.

------
TeMPOraL
Here's a trick we used when I was a student: we had an FTP server shared by
students of all years of our program, and we put there a copy of every
required and recommended textbook, as well as slides from the lectures and
every other piece of material that was relevant to our classes.

Honestly, I think this kind of setup is something _universities_ should
provide for their students. We live in 21th century, it's not _that_ much work
to provide PDFs (with restricted access, if needed, because copyright blah
blah).

------
manaskarekar
Here's the list of free books from the website:
[http://greenteapress.com/wp/](http://greenteapress.com/wp/)

~~~
abetusk
Free as in gratis, not free as in libre. It looks like most of them are under
a "Non-Commercial" license.

------
harry8
Richard Feynman's adventures in textbooks 50 years as told in "Surely you're
joking" ago are still instructive. It's pretty embarrassing that it is still
so bad. More power to Downey, support him. Perfect is the enemy of good and
the ally of the status quo, which is horrible.

~~~
ivan_ah
You refer to this story, right?
[http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm](http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm)

------
jimmaswell
Textbooks are flat out unnecessary. The notes on the board should be enough to
understand the material, and the teacher can either write their own problem
sets or copy them from somewhere and put them online. There's just no excuse
to require a textbook for a class - it means the teacher is unable to
communicate the material effectively and needs the students to read it on
their own, can't be bothered to write or copy homework sets, or is forcing
students to buy the professor's own book out of greed, none of which should be
seen as acceptable. If the department makes you have one, just don't use it
(happened in a few of my classes). For classes that need some out of class
readings like history or English, there's no excuse to make students buy books
when the body of freely available, uncopyrighted work out there on the
internet is so easy to access. Good example: a history class I had a few
semesters ago where the primary documents were a simple downloadable .doc.

I've had lots of classes that worked like this, particularly my Calculus I/II
classes where there was a textbook but homework from it was just suggested,
not collected, and the lectures were entirely sufficient to understand the
material and do well on the exams.

Beyond being a pointless scam, I'd go as far as to say textbooks make
professors worse than they would be otherwise by letting professors use them
as a crutch.

~~~
repsilat
I disagree fairly strongly. Maybe this is reasonable for lower level courses,
but in students' third or fourth year of study it seems short-sighted to
expect the bulk of their learning to happen in live face-to-face lectures.
Requiring them to learn independently, be it from prerecorded lectures or
textbooks, allows classes to cover a lot more ground and (importantly) save
lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to
students' individual needs.

On covering more ground: this isn't just about expecting students to spend
"their own time" learning things not covered in class, it's also about more
efficiently using their time. With textbooks (and, to a lesser extent,
prerecorded lectures) students can learn at their own pace. They can spend
more time on the parts that they find difficult without holding up the rest of
the class, and they can move more quickly through the material that they
understand easily.

~~~
jimmaswell
>in students' third or fourth year of study it seems short-sighted to expect
the bulk of students' learning to happen in live face-to-face lectures.

I'm about to graduate a 4-year Computer Science program. It hasn't generally
been necessary in any classes so far to get additional information outside the
lectures from the textbooks for me, besides in one online class where there
were no lectures, or an instance where the specifics of the virtual machine's
language you had to write a compiler for were specified in the textbook -
written by the teacher, but free digitally from the campus library, so no big
objection in that instance aside from that not being mentioned in the
syllabus, and that he could've just put all that in the text file where all
the lab-section assignments were defined. But back on track, the general
learning of the concept of compilation/parsing/etc occurred in class, and you
applied it there. Your notes and the task description were enough.

>Expecting students to learn independently, be it from prerecorded lectures or
textbooks, allows classes to cover a lot more ground and (importantly) save
lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting to
students' individual needs.

Posting the notes online is great and often necessary, as it was in my
algorithms class last semester where long algorithm pseudocode was in the
notes, but the way the class worked was that everything was explained in-
class, with the premade notes plus running trough things on the chalk board,
and only what was in the notes was what you were responsible for. It was an
effective format.

>save lecturer face-time for the task it's actually best suited for: reacting
to students' individual needs.

People asked questions if they had any, and more explanation would follow, and
it wasn't a problem. Taking notes on paper while listening to the lecture in
real time has been shown to be very effective compared to alternatives, so
using lecture time on that is probably better than leaving any concepts to be
learned primarily by textbook reading.

>students can learn at their own pace.

Lecture notes being posted beforehand, as it was in that algorithms class,
works for people who feel they're struggling and need to read over the notes
before class, and the notes are always there later if you need to review
something. Though, the student will have to resist not writing notes just
because the notes are already there - aside from the audio-to-paper process's
effectiveness in learning, additional explanation/metaphores/comments will be
given, especially in response to questions asked. I've almost never seen it be
the case that one person holds up a class with questions everyone else knows
the answer to - often many others were wondering the same thing, or the answer
adds more even if you thought you already knew everything about that specific
point. I also think enforcing a certain pace is good - it's happened that I've
read on subjects on my own and forgot parts due to going "too fast," but
that's never happened in a college class, so it seems like a tradeoff of
classes feeling annoyingly slow sometimes.

------
innocentoldguy
I completely agree with the author's comment on shorter books. My biggest
problem with instructional books in general is that they're filled with too
much fluff. It isn't that I can't read 50 pages a week. I just don't want to,
when the usable content could have been written in a page or less. While
anecdotes and metaphors are great for inflating page count and price, they do
little to help me understand a concept, and just become busywork, which I
cannot abide.

------
ez_psychedelic
I recommend "The no Bullshit guide to Math and Physics". It is about 300
pages, but goes along with what this article is about. This book is such a
different approach (combines math with engineering and physics principals) so
as to give validity to the maths you're reading. Also, it is written in a
casual tone. Highly recommend it.

------
banjodude321
"Learning from Data" is a reasonable example of the type of textbook the
author is asking for.

There is something to be said about the value of "reference" books, however.
Maybe reference books shouldn't be used in classes, but there can be great
value in a 1000 page book that has a complete discussion of everything you'd
expect.

~~~
seveibar
I personally work with one of the authors of this book (Malik). He has
mentioned that the book optimizes simplicity and brevity, and that when the
authors were writing the book they constrained themselves to an exact number
of pages to force themselves to make decisions on what was important or
unimportant.

Another interesting tactic they employed was an indicator on the page that the
reader could skip ahead to another page (usually before a challenging proof)
without losing the chapter's main concepts.

~~~
sitkack
That is excellent. Do the authors have any articles about their process?
Sounds like something that should be replicated in other educational material.

Textbooks have gone off the rails in terms of price (high), information
density (low) precisely because the goal is profit and not education.

~~~
seveibar
I don't know of any articles they've written about the process, they do
maintain a forum where they post extensions to the book (on things that change
often, e.g. neural networks) for free.

I agree, though I do think that professors evaluate each textbook to make sure
it has the information they'd like to teach within it so the issue becomes
more of a professors preference- should they provide a reference textbook or a
book that perfectly matches their course.

In the case of Malik, (I believe) he writes books to fit how he thinks the
material should be learned then teaches the courses to match the books.
Attending the class would usually give answers to some of the example problems
and go through the concepts.

------
hackermailman
The two biggest universities in my city have some sort of publishing agreement
where they can print and bind the relevant textbook material to give to
students for free and when possible they use open textbooks
[https://open.bccampus.ca/](https://open.bccampus.ca/) though there is a
government grant paying professors to maintain the texts.

The best thing about the open textbook site is other professors and TAs review
the books like this Precalculus example [https://open.bccampus.ca/find-open-
textbooks/?uuid=2fdb8a19-...](https://open.bccampus.ca/find-open-
textbooks/?uuid=2fdb8a19-9f31-40fe-80e9-0a4d2dd4cc7a&contributor=&keyword=&subject=)

------
dharness
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 $100 books which are "required" but I
haven't bought them in years.

What I /would/ like, is sample problems with solutions ;)

~~~
Fomite
In contrast (because people have different learning styles) I get almost
nothing out of video lectures, and _vastly_ prefer having books. One of the
things holding me back from learning Julia is the current dearth of quality
books.

~~~
tnecniv
The language docs are pretty well written and accessible.

------
rocqua
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 well if the
reader points to equivalent chapters in the tome.

~~~
cbgb
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 completely manageable to
read as a student, and they were the best textbook-related learning
experiences of my undergraduate years.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Galois-Correspondence-
Ma...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Galois-Correspondence-Maureen-
Fenrick/dp/0817640266)

~~~
Rotten194
I've had a similar experience with linguistics. The main textbook I've used
was $40, is a bit under 500 pages (but is smaller than a typical textbook, and
paperback), and I've used it for 3 classes. That's the kind of book I'm happy
to buy. Meanwhile my experience with CS classes has been a > $150 textbook
that is never referenced in class, is outdated, and is seemingly on the
syllabus just to have something there. I ended up just not bothering with the
books even if the syllabus claimed they were required.

~~~
syndev
What was the book?

~~~
Rotten194
Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 3rd edition by Andrew Carnie. I got it
used, so it's probably a bit more expensive if you want a new copy, but it's a
great book.

------
benhill70
As a student in my forties I have been appalled at the price and quality of
many of my textbooks. The $300 dollars worth of textbooks in one class could
have done with a few youtube videos. The publishers know this cash cow is
coming to an end due to piracy and online textbook rentals. Now, they are
charging less for textbook but gouging students on the mandatory online
components.

------
ziikutv
Professors often do not have the choice to pick a book. They have to teach off
of one recommended by department.

more politics into the education industry.

~~~
chrisseaton
But 'the department' is nothing more than all the professors grouped together.

~~~
ziikutv
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)

~~~
chrisseaton
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?

~~~
ziikutv
MATH courses typically have large student count, thus needing multiple
professors and sections.

BTW, What I said is anecdotal.

------
sitkack
Allen B. Downey needs to be a MacArthur Fellow.

Most commenters here should re-read the article and internalize the body of
work created.

------
sbuttgereit
At the school I went to, many of the classes had no formal textbooks.

You bought a 50-100 page of not terribly dense text/examples; these were
photocopies on plain old letter paper that were stapled together and pre-
punched for three-ring-binders. Each class you'd buy one of those per semester
and they were developed in-house. That was it. Naturally, it wasn't always
this way, but certainly for the basic classes it was exactly this way.

Note this wasn't any sort of engineering field and what they were teaching
didn't have a lot of authors writing standard issue coursework to begin with,
but it was great material that was very focused to the classes they were
teaching. I still hold on to them, too: very concise and a nice reference if I
ever need to brush up.

------
andrepd
Much of this articles comes across as basically complaining: "these books are
long and these books are hard". Why, it's true that sometimes this is a valid
criticism, but what about when the subject matter really _is_ long and hard to
understand? What then?

------
tedmiston
> Students: You should go on strike. If your textbook costs more than $50,
> don’t buy it. If it has more than 500 pages, don’t read it. There’s just no
> excuse for bad books.

This is bad advice.

You need the book for reference or at least will do better with the book most
of the time. If you want to stick one to the publisher, buy used.

Textbooks need a "microservices revolution". And not with these crappy
interactive DRM-ridden e-textbooks with exercise codes... the experience with
most of those is markedly worse than print books. We need more open content
like webpages and journal articles. O'Reilly does it best. Textbooks authors
should follow / adapt their model.

~~~
3131s
Governments should definitely pay content creators to make open-source
curricula for schools and universities.

I agree with Stallman that proprietary learning materials are antithetical to
the spirit of learning itself. Part of the process of learning is rearranging
information, changing it, collectively annotating it, and consuming it through
convenient new media (a digitized, hyperlinked document on a open comment
platform, for example). There are only limited possibilities with proprietary
information in this regard, and even fewer possibilities with proprietary
software. Schools should not use either one.

------
andrewwharton
I'd like to see this philosophy applied to some of the open content out there
already like the OpenStax textbooks [0]. For example, the Prealgebra text is
1152 pages in the PDF format.

I think there would be a huge amount of value in distilling these down to
chapters which are 10-15 pages each instead of 100-150 pages each. Of course
you would loose a lot of detail, but they could serve as a summary of 'this is
the important stuff you need to know'. The expanded textbooks would serve as
reference material if you want to go into more detail.

[0] [https://openstax.org/](https://openstax.org/)

------
Bioeye
I've taken a class from Allen and used his books. In the context of his
classes they are very good and the short readings can be useful, but taken as
a reference like many other textbooks are they don't do as much.

------
whodywop
I believe the earliest textbooks contained a gloss in the margin written by
students which clarified the main text. It contained translations, notes,
references, etc. This helped to circumvent the _curse of knowledge_ whereby
most authors have zero memory of their early misconceptions of the subject (a
major reason why most textbooks are rubbish).

I think this ought to be reintroduced by major publishers -- new editions to
contain copious annotations garnered from students who field-tested the
previous edition, explaining how they conquered the parts that _they_ found
hard.

------
Nutomic
I studied Computer Science in Germany, and I didn't use a single book during
my entire bachelor. The way it worked was professors always put the slides
from their lectures online, so we could reference them as sources. Sometimes,
additional references or texts were available online.

In addition to lectures, we had weekly classes where we applied the concepts
from the lecture in practice. Exercises for these classes were also available
online.

All of this material was free for students, and created by the professors and
instructors specifically for the course.

------
ivan_ah
I like the suggested price point of under 50$. Perhaps I'd go even lower and
require < $40. This is enough money to keep self-published authors motivated
to maintain their books and write new ones, and also affordable enough for
most students.

This is the approach I've been following with my MATH&PHYS and LA books, and I
will continue to use with future titles.

I guess the ideal case for students would be OER, but then when everybody owns
the book nobody is particularly invested in maintaining it and improving it...

------
smoyer
"Before long, the students learn that they shouldn’t even try. The result is a
1000-page doorstop."

My oldest two are through college and learned that they shouldn't just
purchase the list of books dictated by their classes. As stated by the
article, many times the textbooks were not required to pass the test. If I had
to estimate, I'd say they spent half as much as their fellow students on
textbooks.

------
adamnemecek
Also all CS books (ok, maybe not all but the vast majority) need to ship with
code. To quote Linus, "talk is cheap. Show me the code".

------
jdeisenberg
I agree that textbook costs are exorbitant, and I use open source, online, or
very low cost books when teaching at the community college level. I've been
using the interactive version of the "Think Like a Computer Scientist" book
when teaching the introductory programming course. The students still don't
read the material, at least not before the lecture.

~~~
sitkack
Start with a quiz?

------
forkLding
I think this is needed, most courses have one or two textbooks which
compounded together with a full courseload is a lot of pages, however the full
textbook is also never used, only several chapters are usually recommended
reading, really beating the point of buying the whole book

------
dmitripopov
Back in my student days there were really extensive textbooks that no one of
us read and short brochures on the subject published by university that was
the real source of knowledge and how to apply it in practice.

------
nabla9
Many teachers use chapters from several books and their own material.

It should be possible to buy student textbooks by chapter and print your own
book. Most cities with college have few high quality printing services.

------
larrydag
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?

~~~
hackermailman
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/](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...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-science-fall-2010/readings/)

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.

------
sghiassy
Disagree - many students have different learning patterns. Textbooks are only
one way to teach, and there are many different ways to learn

------
teekee
"If you can’t find one, write one."

What would be the best way to write a free book please? Any pointers?
Experience?

~~~
dullroar
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! :)

~~~
AllenDowney
This is very similar to my method. The first time I teach a class, I draft
some notes. After the class, I fix the problems, or at least flag them for
next time. The second time through, I add, remove, edit, refine, etc., based
on feedback from students and my own observation (and, often, what I have
learned since last time :)

Many of my examples start with code, so the first draft of the chapter is
mostly explaining the worked example.

It's not very different from the work most profs do when they are developing a
class, but at the end you have a book that has co-evolved to fit your students
and the learning goals.

------
itchyjunk
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/](http://greenteapress.com/wp/)

~~~
wazanator
I know you're looking for free but Humble actually has a pretty great python
ebook bundle right now, [https://www.humblebundle.com/books/python-book-
bundle](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/python-book-bundle)

------
danielbigham
Amen. This author's thesis sounds pretty darn good to me.

------
mncharity
> Choose books your students can read and understand.

A noble and audacious goal.

> If you can’t find one,

Realistically accessed.

> write one. It’s not that hard.

WTF?

Ok, I can see how this could be either plausible, or utterly absurd, depending
on the domain.

> check whether they understand.

Err, does this mean "I think they didn't do too badly on the midterm"? Or
daily quizes and clicker questions? Or a grad student, with a focus on the
field's education research, dedicated to running concept inventories and
stats?

At least in college introductory science education, "check whether they
understand" is hard, an area of active research, and historically, a cesspit
of professorial self-deception.

> It’s not that hard.

Let's draw a proton. With marker on whiteboard, as a circle (not hard). With
an illustration app, as an arbitrarily-sized hard sphere with physically-bogus
lighting (not hard). With code, as a gradient, based on the proton mass
density curve (not hard, but did eat some hours).

Let's draw atomic nuclei. As balls of red and blue marbles (not hard). As
gradients, post-processing from recently published ab initio density
functional plots, when available (hard). Background: light nuclei are lumpy.

Ok, so let's aim lower.

Let's draw the Sun. As an arbitrarily colored circle (not hard). What about as
a circle, with a color at least vaguely realistic? Demonstrably hard, as it's
so rare. You likely can't ask your first-tier astronomy graduate student to do
it.[1] Or almost any of the professorial authors of the many introductory
astronomy textbooks.

Ok, so let's aim lower.

Last week I was reading an AP Chemistry curriculum standard. Towards the top,
"atoms are conserved". Great. Later on, "atoms are neutral"[when charged,
they're instead "ions"]. Okaaaaay. So are there any atoms on the right side of
H + light -> H+ + e- ? The old "molecules aren't made _of_ atoms, they're made
_from_ atoms" school. Two historical threads of definition. Left for students
to reconcile, because that's obviously where the burden should lie. And this
wasn't Pearson trash content, this was a curriculum spec (albeit a poor one).
So what do you tell your kids to make it safe for them to take standardized
exams?

"[N]ot that hard." I know wizzy education-focused MIT and Harvard professors
who work really hard to raise some small bit of intro physics and biology
content from wretched, to very-slightly-less-wretched.

Perhaps for some domains "not that hard" is true. And it helps if the
objective is "no worse then the rest of the crap out there". And if "check
whether they understand" means "ask a few clicker questions, and give a random
quiz" instead of "systematically run formative misconception checks". But,
wow. It _so_ doesn't match the areas I'm most familiar with.

Perhaps the manifesto is missing some scope-of-applicability predicate?

[1]
[http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6](http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6)
"Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed - an underappreciated
obstacle to creating better content"

