Five Free Calculus Textbooks 430
| (See each) | |
| author | (See each) |
| pages | (See each) |
| publisher | (See each) |
| rating | (See each) |
| reviewer | Ben Crowell |
| ISBN | (n/a) |
| summary | (See each) |
| First-Year Calculus Notes | |
| author | Paul Garrett |
| pages | 70 |
| URL | http://www.math.umn.edu/~garrett/calculus/ |
| rating | 7/10 |
| summary | Would make a good concise refresher. |
The author provides this book in PDF format. As far as I can tell from the somewhat ambiguous notice on his web page, the book is intended to be licensed under the GPL copyleft license. That warms my heart as an open-source enthusiast, but it's slightly strange, for a couple of reasons. First, the GPL is a software license, and is less suitable as a copyleft license for books than the GFDL or a CC license. Also, the source code of the book isn't available (it appears to have been done in LaTeX), which I think makes it legally impossible under the GPL to redistribute the book, whereas the author's intent in GPL-ing it was presumably to make it freely distributable. Just as I was in the process of submitting this review to Slashdot, the author replied to an e-mail I'd sent him about this, and it sounds like he's interested in clearing up this issue, and really does want his book to be free as in speech.
This is a lively and very readable treatment of basic calculus. At 70 pages, it's a welcome antidote to the usual bloated textbooks, and the topics that are included match up pretty well with my own opinions of what it's really vital for a student to know after taking a calculus course. The tone is conversational without being condescending or cutesy, and the author almost always explains why he's introducing something, rather than just throwing it at the reader. (An unfortunate exception is the opening section on inequalities.) There is no attempt at rigor whatsoever, which I consider to be a feature, not a bug. Applications are discussed, although not enough for my taste (and I have to suppress my gag reflex every time I see a calculus book that insists on presenting the acceleration of gravity in non-metric units).
Although the book comes with some of the paraphernalia of a complete college textbook, such as homework problems, it's probably not the kind of book that another professor could just adopt as a stand-alone text, nor would I recommend it for someone learning calculus on her own for the first time. The title suggests that the author had in mind more of a memory aid, or a way to keep students from having to scribble madly in their notebooks for an hour and a half at a stretch. It lacks an index and illustrations, and there are some misfeatures in terms of organization: the chapters aren't numbered, and the homework problems are scattered around where they're hard to find. In some cases it sounds as though the first time a word or concept is used, he's assuming the reader has already heard it defined. I would, however, recommend this book to someone who needs to refresh her memory of calculus, and doesn't want to spend hours wading through epsilons and deltas to get to the highlights. It might also be a good option for the student who is completely broke, and needs a reference to use in place of an officially required text that carries an exploitative price tag. Although there are other calculus textbooks that can be downloaded without paying, this is the only one I'm aware of that follows the typical order of topics, and is also (AFAICT) copylefted, so that we can be assured it needn't evaporate if the author signs a publishing contract, or loses interest in maintaining his web site.
| Difference Equations to Differential Equations: An Introduction to Calculus | |
| author | Dan Sloughter |
| pages | 600 |
| URL | http://math.furman.edu/~dcs/book/ |
| rating | 6/10 |
| summary | Takes too long to get there. |
Like Garrett's text, this one appears to have been done in LaTeX, is licensed under the GPL, and appears to suffer from the same legal problems, because it's not available in source form.
The book is well written, and seems to have been well designed for practical classroom use. The approach is visual and intuitive, and there are lots and lots of graphs and numerical calculations. I felt, however, that it took a long time to get going, and the idiosyncratic selection of topics might make it difficult to use at many schools. Although the very first page gives a nice clear explanation of what calculus is about, we then have to wait until about page 136 to learn any calculus. I say "about" because of the inconvenient way in which the book is split up into 54 separate PDF files, each of which has page numbers starting from 1. I had to estimate page number 136 by weighing part of the book on a postal scale. Related to this problem is the fact that the book has no index or table of contents.
The book uses many numerical examples, which gives it a modern feeling . After all, calculus was invented by Newton and Leibniz because they needed to do calculations in closed form, but nowadays it's more natural to solve many problems on a computer, using a spreadsheet or a programming language. The book has a problem, however, in integrating the computer stuff with the didactic parts and the homework problems. No indication is given of how the numerical examples were actually computed. The author may consider it a trivial task to set up a spreadsheet or write a ten-line program in Python or Mathematica, but it's not so trivial for many students, and they will need extensive guidance from elsewhere to be able to carry out such computations for themselves. This makes the text incomplete in practical terms: any instructor wanting to use it would have to come up with extensive support materials to go with it. It also contributes to my sense that the book lacks focus. Students have a hard enough time learning the basic concepts and techniques of integration and differentiation, but to use this book, they would also have to learn about computer programming and difference equations. Adding to the bloat is the author's tendency to discuss every possible pathological case before moving on to the main event. It's a little like a parent trying to explain sex to his child, but feeling obliged to explain foot fetishes before getting on with where babies come from.
The examples that students are expected to do numerically also presuppose quite a bit of resourcefulness and insight. For instance, one of the homework problems asks the student to sum the series 4(1-1/3+1/5-1/7+...) numerically, adding up "...a sufficient number of terms to enable you to guess the value of the sum," which turns out to be pi. The trouble is that over 600 terms are required to get the sum to settle down in the second decimal place, which is about the minimum I'd want to see to convince me it was pi. Pity the poor student who first tries 10 terms on a calculator, then 50 terms on a spreadsheet, and then finally realizes he's going to need to write a Python program to get the job done. Of course, some students might enjoy the process, but my experience (teaching college science majors taking introductory physics) is that the majority don't consider computers to be fun.
| Lectures on Calculus | |
| author | Evgeny Shchepin |
| pages | 143 |
| URL | http://www.math.uu.se/~oleg/ShchepinCalc.html |
| rating | 2/10 |
| summary | Not for consumption by mere students. |
This book is from a set of lectures on calculus given by visiting professor Evgeny Shchepin at Uppsala University in 2001. The first obstacle potential readers will encounter is that the book is provided in PostScript format, with hideous bitmapped type 3 fonts embedded. This makes it virtually impossible to view the book on a monitor in any legible representation, although it looks fine when you print it out. The typical Windows or MacOS user will give up long before that point. This is a shame, because it's not at all difficult these days to get LaTeX to output Adobe Acrobat files that are viewable on virtually any computer, and are legible on the screen. There is no index, and virtually no graphs or other figures.
The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written. This deep, dark forest of mathematical symbols, interspersed with ungrammatical English, is meant to follow the historical development of the subject, but it never makes it clear why the historical route is the right one to follow. There are many seemingly pointless digressions.
Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course? The presence of end-of-chapter homework problems would seem to imply that it was. If so, I feel sorry for them. Although it's cute that the author manages to develop integrals before limits, and derivatives only at the very end, I somehow doubt that real, live students would read this book and exclaim, "We sure are lucky to be learning calculus using this novel order of topics!" Most of the problems begin with the words "Prove that...," and neither the text nor the problems give any of the standard applications to biology, economics, physics, etc.
| Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals | |
| author | Jerome H. Keisler |
| pages | 992 |
| URL | http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html |
| rating | 10/10 |
| summary | I wish I'd learned calculus from it! |
Textbooks are usually unoriginal, because most teachers are conservative in their choices. They get used to teaching a subject a certain way, and don't want to change. This is a calculus textbook with a very unusual approach. It was published in 1976, and evidently was successful enough, despite its idiosyncracy, to justify a second edition a decade later. Its publisher, however, eventually allowed it to go out of print. The copyright has reverted to the author, and he has made it available in digital form on his web site. The digital book consists of pages scanned in from a printed copy and assembled into an Acrobat file, so it's a big download, and you can't do some things with it, such as searching the text for a particular word.
The title leaves no doubt that the book is different. Whereas most textbooks these days define derivatives and integrals in terms of limits, this one uses infinitesimals. The real numbers are generalized to make a number system called the hyperreal numbers, which include infinitesimally small numbers as well as infinitely large ones. Essentially, this represents a return to the way Newton and Leibniz originally conceptualized the calculus, but with more rigor.
I don't know about other people, but when I learned calculus, I got very uneasy when we got to the Leibniz notation. My teacher said that dy/dx wasn't really one number divided by another, but rather an abbreviation for the limit of the quantity y/x. That wasn't so bad, but what really made me queasy was when he then suggested that you could usually get the right answer by treating these dx and dy thingies as if they were numbers. The scary part was that word "usually." What was legal and what wasn't? How many sizes of infinitesimals were there? Was it legal to say that 1/dx was infinite? What operations would lead to paradoxes? What about proofs that used infinite numbers to show that 1=2? The wonderful thing about this book is that you end up knowing exactly what you can and can't do with infinities and infinitesimals, and you get to use the Leibniz notation in all its intuitively appealing glory. For instance, the chain rule really can be proved simply by writing (dz/dy)(dy/dx)=dz/dx, simply canceling the dy's.
It would be interesting to see how students reacted to this book when learning calculus from scratch. I suspect that they'd have an easier time with many of the concepts like implicit differentiation, which seems so awkward in the traditional approach, but they might be scared a little by the initial development of the hyperreal number system. The book develops the hypperreal system axiomatically, which left me yearning for more of a constructive method. Then again, we develop the rational and real numbers axiomatically in high school, so maybe it's not such a big issue. My initial unease was cleared up by a few crucial examples:
- If H and K are infinite, then H-K may be infinite or finite -- it depends on which infinite numbers H and K are.
- If H is infinite, then (2H+1)/(H+1) isn't equal to 2, but it differs infinitesimally from 2.
- (H+1)1/2-(H-1)1/2 is infinitesimal.
I confess, however, to a little residual indigestion at the way the author develops the integral. He introduces finite Reimann sums first, and gives several numerical examples. But next, instead of taking the limit of sums with more and more terms, he takes the finite sum with n terms, and replaces n with an infinite integer. Instant vertigo!
This is a wonderful, original textbook, and I hope it remains free on the web forever -- it's not copylefted, so unfortunately it may disappear if the author stops maintaining his web site.
| The Calculus Bible | |
| author | G.S. Gill |
| pages | 370 |
| URL | http://www.math.byu.edu/Math/CalculusBible/ |
| rating | 3/10 |
| summary | Incomplete, and badly written. |
I'm reviewing this book in February of 2004. It's clearly not a finished product, and I'm not sure whether or not the author is still actively working on it. The book is available from the Brigham Young University math department's server, but the author isn't on the department's list of faculty, which makes me think he may have moved on to another job and abandoned the book. It's provided as a PDF file. There is no copyright page and no licensing agreement, so it's hard to know the book's real legal status.
The path through the topics is pretty standard for an introductory calculus course: a review of functions and trigonometry, followed by limits, differentiation, and integration. There is a good selection of problems, although to my taste as a physicist far too few are applied to anything useful. There is a table of contents, but no index. There are no illustrations; sprinkled throughout the text are little placeholders for graphs that just say "graph."
Although the problems I've referred to so far are ones that could be fixed if the author continued to work on the book, I feel that there are some more fundamental problems with this text that will not go away unless it is extensively rewritten. The style is extremely dry, and moreover the author has a habit of introducing concepts without any explanation or preparation. A symptom of this is that the student is expected to grind through the first hundred pages without any clear statement about what calculus is, what it's good for, or even whether the initial chapters are calculus (they're not). Equal prominence is given to topics that I would consider vital (the fundamental theorem of calculus) and others that I would label as trivial (tabulations of facts) or esoteric (the Dedekind cut property).
The Leibniz notation, dy/dx, is given with only this explanation "To emphasize the fact that the derivatives are taken with respect to the independent variable x, we use the following notation, as is customary..." Huh? So are these dx and dy things numbers? Is dy/dx the quotient of them?
Even if the missing graphs were included, the approach would still be relentlessly symbolic, rather than visual. For instance, integration by parts is introduced without ever giving its geometric interpretation.
Statistics Textbooks? (Score:2, Interesting)
Does any such beast exist?
Books (Score:2, Interesting)
Bookmark Story (Score:3, Interesting)
They later stopped the trend because students complained about how on average you read 10 pages out of every book you purchased for each class.
The bookstore figured if people are just buying the books cause the professor said so... and the students never intend on really reading it. They mind as well maximize profit by a few cents.
Hell hath no place in American primary (Score:5, Interesting)
But then again you can't find anyone riding on a yacht or playing polo in the pages of an American textbook either. The texts also can't say someone has a boyish figure, or is a busboy, or is blind, or suffers a birth defect, or is a biddy, or the best man for the job, a babe, a bookworm, or even a barbarian.
All these words are banned from U.S. textbooks on the grounds that they either elitist (polo, yacht) sexist (babe, boyish figure), offensive (blind, bookworm) ageist (biddy) or just too strong (hell which is replaced with darn or heck). God is also a banned word in the textbooks because he or she is too religious.
To get the full 500-word list of what is banned and why, consult "The Language Police," a new book by New York University professor of education Dianne Ravitch, a former education official in President George H.W. Bush's administration and a consultant to the Clinton administration.
She says she stumbled on her discovery of what's allowed and not allowed by accident because publishers insist that they do not impose censorship on their history and English textbook authors but merely apply rules of sensitivity -- which have expanded mightily since first introduced in the 1970s to weed out gender and racial bias.
What is Calculus for? (Score:1, Interesting)
I could never figure out why Calculus would ever be of any use to me. Do any fellow Slashdotters have any examples of when Calculus came in handy in a real-life situation? (Rocket Scientists and Astrophysicists need not reply)
DO NOT SLASHDOT AARON (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If you like free calculus books... (Score:5, Interesting)
what is source? when is it open? (Score:3, Interesting)
THis is totally a side issue, but the source thing really interests me. i don't know a lot about what format actual source code comes in, but a lot of the software I download has its souce basically in a textfile...so here's my question: is having to format the book (for presentation, headings, etc.) any different than having to put source code through a compiler, and possibly having to port? Is the source in this case really unavailable,, since the text of the document is right there to be had?
Just curious...
Library of Alexandria (Score:2, Interesting)
You get what you pay for (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in college, our physics books were a "collaborative" book developed by Thomas Moore and "published" by McGraw-Hill. I dug one of the volumes out- it's bound with that cheesy plastic springy binder, because my college had to print it. So it's practically falling apart- whereas the textbooks from my father's classes are still looking good on his shelf in his office.
Doing your homework was fun- absolutely every problem set we did had at LEAST one mistake, to the point that our physics teacher was probably the most annoyed and frustrated of all of us as we went over our homework the next day. Every problem had to be worked out by the class together and double-checked, because the teacher's edition was wrong too! Great except when you're behind, everyone understood the problem, and you need to catch up on the curriculum schedule.
Graphs has wrong units, labels, variable names, or simply didn't exist but had problems referencing them. Equations were flat-out wrong or had typos. Page numbers and section numbers didn't match(Ie "see section 3-2 for more information on..."). Diagrams looked like they were drawn by a kid(you know, things like sailboats with triangle sails and trapezoid hulls? Flowers with smiley faces? Etc.)
The kicker? We were the second year to use the book, and the first year's class had turned in a HUGE list of corrections to Moore. The second edition sprouted even more errors, and some of the errors from the first year were never corrected. We weren't the only ones using it, either; plenty of other schools turned in corrections as well. I feel sorry for the kids at Pomona, must have been embarrassing to know other schools were using it.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976 (Score:5, Interesting)
I was in the Honors Math program, and the program director, in a moment of insanity, decided to use Kiesler's new book with the Infinitesimals approach. But there was only one problem, the book wasn't actually IN PRINT yet. Every monday, we received a new chapter of the book's galley proofs, followed by a long session of corrections. The teacher would write the errata on the blackboard and we wrote them in our texts. This took almost the entire session. We met 3 times a week, so the errata effectively nuked 1/3 of our classroom time.
Of course, this isn't likely to be a problem in the revised 2nd edition. However, the problem with this text is that it uses a completely nonstandard approach to calculus. The Infinitesimals approach is weak on the standard methods you really study calculus FOR, like differential equations. My roommate took the regular calc course and I studied with him, learning a few standard differentiation methods. I used a few of those techniques in the midterm test, they were marked wrong (even though they were the correct answers) and got called into the teacher's office. He said, "you didn't learn that in MY COURSE, did you?" We had to do everything the hard way, with infinitesimals, which was supposed to make you a better mathematician. It didn't.
As an amusing side note, I had a scheduling conflict with another final and had to take a makeup test, I was assigned a room to take the test all by myself, the teacher said he'd come back at the end to collect the test and if I left the room, he'd assumed I cheated and he'd give me an F. During the test, the building caught on fire on an upper floor and smoke started to drift in through the ducts. A campus security cop came in the room and told me to leave. I said I wouldn't, I only had 10 more minutes left on the test and I could finish before the fire spread. The cop grabbed me and shoved me out the door. The teacher gave me an F on the final for leaving the room. I got a D+ for the course, a passing grade, and that was good enough for me.
Anyway, I suppose the main problem was that the teachers hadn't figured out how to teach Infinitesimal Calculus yet, and I suspect they still haven't. Grappling with the abstraction of hyperreal numbers is extremely impractical in a world where everyone else uses an entirely different methodology. Avoid this text if you don't want your math skills permanently damaged. I think I'll pick up one of these other freebie calc texts and learn it over from scratch.
Re:More useful than you think (Score:5, Interesting)
This story couldn't have been any better timing for me. I just sold my calc book back to my school because I was short on cash. It wasn't a very good calc book in the first place, but I was dissapointed to get rid of it anyways. Now, I not only know of some free ones, but I've got some reviews to help me know where to start.
This is a very heartening thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Open source books (where some others can create derived works too) will make the future good for all (in a statistical sense -- there will be a few that benefit from withholding information).
The main concerns are legal threats (e.g. someone like SCO saying, "All partial derivatives are derivative work of SCO"), public perception.
The perception that the free material is somehow inferior can be propagated (e.g. in societies that pride on conspicuous consumption, the people that influence decisions can make a statement against free books), and general bitterness when some contributors don't think they are given credit.
I envison a big movement of free educational books, where the educators/scientists provide information, techies volunteer effort to find effective means of publishing/presentation, and end users do QA and feedback.
A physicist will come up with a nice theory, a document designer will design a fancy document, a web kiddie will create fancy animations explaining the concept, and all will fit into a standard form of information exchange (provided a large set of people overcome egos, preconceptions and prejudices).
S
Re:Great, except... (Score:3, Interesting)
Steven S. Zumdahl at UIUC wrote an Intro Chemistry book--they still seem to be using it there even though he doesn't teach that class anymore. Here's a link to their Chem 101 class:
Every few years he would come out with a new edition of the book (he's on 6 right now), and the _only_ difference between each edition is the problems at the end of the chapters are scrambled (the numbers aren't even changed)!
I heard rumor that U of I was upset by his blatant misuse of his position there to force students to buy new textbooks, but I can't be certain that is true.
I had edition 4 or 5 when I went to school there, and when I tried to sell it back they would only give me $5 for it because of the new edition. I thought it was far more worthwhile (and entertaining) to keep it and then burn it.
Re:Price != Quality (Score:2, Interesting)
A friend of mine bought a brand new Physics book. He never used it, because he started using Schuam's outlines and other books. When he went to return/resell it, he got enough for a burger and fries at the local McDonalds.
College textbooks are such a scam.
Re:reviewer (Score:5, Interesting)
10 years from now we might be looking at Dr. Crowell as the 'Linus of textbooks'.
Please check out the Wikibooks site (cited above in another post) if you are interested in contributing to the movement.
Open Source K-12 texts can save billions (Score:4, Interesting)
The textbook industry began its climb to prominence in the 1950's and 60's's, as Baby Boomers entered private and public educational institutions in unpecedented numbers. There was a real need for mass produced educational materials, and commercial textbook publishers filled the demand.
As enrollment in educational institutions continued to increase, commercial educational publishers gradually became default the suppliers of text-based educational materials.
Realizing that they had a near monopoly on the educational publishing market, commercial publishers began to raise prices and force "new editions" of classic textbooks into the market to compell new purchases, and defeat the used textbook market. Also, textbook prices began to rise precipitously; it's not unusual for a high school textbook to approach $100, or more.
Continued dependence on commercial publishers for basic textbooks has led to a "fox is living in the henhouse" situation. As a result, massive diseconomies and inefficiencies have been introduced to the academic textbook market.
We now live in a time where most consumers can walk into their neighborhood bookstore and purchase a 10th-grade level book on Euclidean Geometry for $10-15. Yet, the same curriculum material, embellished for a 10th-grade school district, can cast upwards of $100, often in addition to the purchase of required ancillary materials (teacher's guides, study guides, lab tapes, etc.).
Until recently, short of requiring every teacher (or school district) to write its own textbooks, nothing could be done about this costly situation.
With the advent of new Internet technology, and new intellectual property licensing innovations, it is now possible to create free high-quality, distributed banks of educational content. This content can published and distributed for far less than similar materials provided by commercial publishers.
Here is a listing of some well-known open source educational projects
Some new current open source content projects are as follows:
California Open Source Textbook Project (conducting pilot projects)
http://www.opensourcetext.org
Wikipedia World History Project (a beginning pilot)
http://wikibooks.org/wiki/World_History_P
MIT's OpenCourseWare project (a university =based open curriculum project)
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
There is a burgeoning movement to create "open source" educational content banks, from which insitutional (even individual) users can select - and publish - content about virtually *any* educational topic. These content resevoirs will be constructed to meet the most demanding curriculum frameworks, at all levels of curriculum instruction.
The open educational content movement makes sense because the bulk of formal educational content - i.e. the content that is delivered to student by educational institutions - doesn't change very much from year to year. For instance, there has been almost no change in the Calculus, or Euclidean Geometry for hundreds of years. Some basic curriculum areas do change, although slowly (with a very few exceptions). Thus, it's possible to imagine a scenario where free, open source access to educational content - based on sound curriculum frameworks put forward by our best public and private institutions - would benefit educational institutions, students, and taxpayers. More, bettwr quality, and less costly educational content will result.
Many foreign governments and international agencies are on the constant lookout for high quality inexpensive acces to high quality educational content in English, and other languages; they will also benefit from the reduced cost, greater quality, and wider availablility of open source educational content.
A few points about Wheelock's (Score:1, Interesting)
1. First of all, Wheelock is dead and has been for a considerable period of time. So I guess you can blame the publisher and Richard LeFleur, whom it hired to do the most recent revision.
2. Wheelock's Latin was first published in 1956, and is now in its sixth edition. So, that's 6 editions in 48 years, or an average of eight years per edition. Granted, I don't know what the distribution of the editions is year-wise, but still that seems pretty reasonable.
3. True, Latin and Calculus aren't changing, but teaching styles are. I don't care for all of the new additions to Wheelock 6, but the "Practice and Review" sentences are very helpful. So long as new revisions are improvements and not merely changes, I don't mind them.
U.S. Navy Calculus book (Score:5, Interesting)
After the war, the theory people took over again, of course.
Re:reviewer (Score:1, Interesting)
They should modernize Calculus/Math instruction (Score:2, Interesting)
Oftentimes, Math is taught as something for the geeks/propellerheads and classical Humanities training is almost totally divorced from it.
I think that is a mistake.
We should really use Math, as just that, a language - and try to use it to express concepts taught in the Humanities to better grasps some seemingly abstract concepts that words (which were "invented" by man) cannot express.
Think about it - how many of us took Spanish and French lessons in middle school and summarily forgot it right after the course? Why is that, because we were only tutored in the syntax of those languages and we didn't apply it to real life in our daily conversations. The same is true for Math.
But unlike other "human" languages, Math predates us - we only "discover" it as we push the edge of our comprehension of the world around us.
For myself, I've rehabilitated my Math instruction by using some visualization tools like Mathematica which facilitates comprehension of abstract concepts on an instinctive level.
I think having tools like Mathematica should be a requirement for math instruction.
Re:Price != Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Incidentially (Score:2, Interesting)
Some CS people might be interested in the book on Information theory [cam.ac.uk] by Dave Mackay (author of Dasher [cam.ac.uk]). Unlike most people, he seems to have taken a truly "Open-Source" approach to book publishing.
Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, none of the options are good. Share books? Upgrade the entire class to the next edition? Spend ten minutes each day trying to reconcile the two? Scour eBay? Let the photocopier do its copyright-infringing thing?
For the people who can afford to live with the textbook scam, it's only an irritation. But for those who can't, it's a major setback to the process of education. And the last thing an already poor person needs is another setback.
I think that educational materials shouldn't be subject to the same market forces as other goods. Of course, they take physical and creative effort to make and distribute. But their purpose is to teach people how to do stuff that they couldn't do before. So the more they're used, the better our society as a whole becomes. Every barrier we can lower that stands between a person and an education, we should lower.
If something is necessary for learning, it should be as free, as convenient, and as high quality as we can make it.
To the naysayers, don't feel sorry if the entire copyright-based textbook publishing system* is decimated. If it does happen--which is probably unlikely--then it will be because free books are serving all the same functions that the old publishing system did, and the old publishers never figured out how to provide anything new. So there wouldn't be any loss.
* Obviously, there will still be a need for physical printing and binding. When I say "copyright-based," I mean that you can only get Book X from Publisher Y because nobody else has the right to print it.
With a free book, many publishers could get in on the act. One could provide a quality product in glossy color for $45, and another could provide a big stack-o-xeroxed-pages for $15. People could choose whatever level of quality best suited their needs. Capitalism at its finest.
Yeah, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Price != Quality (Score:1, Interesting)
This is definitely not the correct spelling of this word. You are most likely thinking along the lines that, "dept." being the abbreviation, the word must begin with those letters. Do you live in an aptpartment or make a dental apptointment?
In a more general sense, I wonder if people are learning to read in an environment too inundated with abbreviations to learn actual words. The fluency level of most college-educated English speakers (in all countries) is bad enough without this kind of nonsense.
Re:More useful than you think (Score:5, Interesting)
sad as it is (and slightly off-topic), the open courseware program is essentially a publicity stunt for MIT. most of the online courses lack complete references, let along complete lecture notes or useful guidance. nor is this a priority for MIT. OCW has gotten nothing but positive publicity, so MIT feels no need to better the program. sure, it's better than nothing, but it's a major stretch to call it courseware.
thank heavens someone is putting up useful online resources. and thank goodness someone is giving us an idea of what the are!
Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976 (Score:2, Interesting)
I was an honors math student who flamed out on the math/engineering track in college because calculus made NO FREAKING SENSE. I worked very hard, and in the beginning classes I could often get the right answers from analogy to the practice problems, but I could never figure out *why* anything worked, which eventually killed me.
So perhaps I'll check this out, I guess the worst that could happen is that I could not understand calculus, in another form.
Textbooks online (Score:4, Interesting)
Calculus textbooks have a long way to go. (Score:1, Interesting)
This is exactly why so many calculus textbooks are so appallingly bad. They almost always ignore the things that confuse students, and they don't take the time to explain things carefully and logically in simple English. They fail to highlight common mistakes in using or understanding the notation and terminology, which is critically important to the learning process.
Below is an example of the kind of writing that calculus text books should be chock filled with, but never are:
Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976 (Score:5, Interesting)
I happened to run across the book on Keisler's site a couple of months ago, and... I read the whole pdf through virtually non-stop. All 913 pages. This is by far the best introduction to calculus I've ever seen - very intuitive and clean.
Those of you arguing for the conventional, limits-based approach vs. the "nonstandard", infinitesimal-based approach are missing the point that the very notation in standard use for calculus (dy/dx etc.) really makes no sense without a notion of infinitesimal. Originally Newton developed calculus in terms of limits, while Leibniz used infinitesimals. Leibniz's notation won out over Newton's, because it accords with the way mathematicians intuitively think about calculus. Neither approach was on a sound mathematical footing until the limits-based approach was formalized in the 1870's. The infinitesimal-based approach was only formalized in 1960, by Robinson - the mathematical tools needed to do so were not available in the 19th century. Due to an historical accident Robinson's approach is called "nonstandard analysis", but the implication that there is anything deficient or deviant about it does not follow. (BTW, in addition to infinitesimals, the hyperreals (or "nonstandard numbers") also include infinite numbers.)
With this approach, developed in Keisler's book, not only is the notation in accord with the model, but many results are much more straightforward to understand and to prove. No more long, tedious epsilon-delta arguments. Really, the only thing complicated about using nonstandard numbers for calculus is the formal development of the hyperreals - and in this book that is relegated to a brief treatment in an appendix. It's easy enough to state and use the properties of the hyperreals without having to go through their formal mathematical construction.
I find it disheartening that the book was allowed to go out of print, and that there are now no (as far as I'm aware) current popular calculus texts using the infinitesimal-based approach. I, like the original poster, and like most students learning today, was always confused by what you could and couldn't do with dy and dx. How I wish I'd had this book 20 years ago.
The upside is that the book is now freely available on the author's site! Go get it!
Bob Hearn
Ugh... I hate stupid people. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a nerd poking fun at someone else for being a nerd in the friendliest way possible.
Re:You can contribute too. (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, the K-12 textbook situation is even worse than the college one, if you can believe that. I teach physics at a community college, and have always been dismayed at the low quality of the big commercial textbooks, but they smell like roses compared to junior high science books. K-12 science books are typically written by a committee of hacks who lack any real teaching or scientific credentials. Then they find some college professors who will allow them to put their names on it in return for some money. (I even read about one case where a college professor was invited to review a science book before publication, gave a bunch of negative comments, and found out later that the publisher had put his name on it, since he'd done so much work on it!) These books just suck to high heaven. They have lots of pictures and little tinted boxes and bells and whistles, but the content is usually full of errors, and it also doesn't tell a logical, understandable story.
It would be cool to see free textbooks make inroads in K-12, but unfortunately the politics of K-12 textbook adoption makes the college process look like a Quaker meeting...
I am starting a project for things like this (Score:2, Interesting)
Reply to this if you think that you can help with this project, and I'll contact you (ah, contact info may be useful also). Basically anyone who is interested in contributing text or helping with technical is really needed.
Note: please don't slashdot above server too badly, uni admins might not like it.
Textbooks seem like a natural market for e-books (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, if you could get an e-copy of the textbook (even node-locked to your laptop with DRM or whatever), who'd want to carry the 5-pounder? Ok - so there might be a few who habitually ruin their books' resale values by making notes or highlighting or whatever, but you can even do that with a lot of ebook readers, now.
Or, the ebook could be at least available to those who buy the wood pulp.
This, to me, is what makes it most glaringly obvious that it's the publishing industry, not the marketplace that doesn't want the e-books.
Re:Price != Quality (Score:2, Interesting)
What I do with my own [lightandmatter.com] physics textbooks is to make the books free (as in speech) and the solutions not free (as in speech). I provide the solutions on a CD to instructors who have adopted the book, and I don't charge them money, but it's under a very strict, proprietary license. Basically all they're allowed to do is hand out solution sets on paper to their students. (There's also an answer checker online, which students can use to see if they got the right answers. There are also some problems with complete worked solutions in the back of the book.)
Re:More useful than you think (Score:3, Interesting)
This was before the whole OCW thing started and may have been one of their test cases to show how good online learning can be. Anyway, it worked for me.
more free books (Score:1, Interesting)
Learned from Keisler's book and loved it (Score:2, Interesting)
My older brother bought me a copy of Keisler's book as a birthday present in 1977 as I was just finishing high school. (My high school didn't offer calculus.) I read the book on my own over the summer, doing a section or two a day after I got home from my summer job working maintenance at a nursing home. I found it very clear and interesting reading, although I do confess to being a math nut.
By the end of the summer I'd gotten through two semesters' worth. I was able to test out of the first two semesters of calculus (with A's) and started third semester calculus in my freshman year. It was a nice start on my major.
I didn't find it a problem to switch from infinitesimals to the standard epsilon/delta limits-based development. Keisler explains the limit approach too, after he's gotten you a firm intuitive grounding using infinitesimals. Checking the index on my copy of the 1976 edition, the discussion starts on page 299. I had made it well past that part by the time I started third semester calculus with the standard approach.