Computer Textbooks For High Schoolers? 361
wetdogjp writes "I recently became a high school teacher, and I've inherited three classes with no textbooks! While two of my classes are introductory in nature, one for computers in general and the other for networking, the third class should prepare juniors and seniors to enter the workforce and start a career in computers. We have some older textbooks by Heathkit available, but the newest of them are four years old. Do Slashdotters have any favorite textbooks that can help kids on their way to becoming junior sysadmins, programmers, networking professionals, etc.? Would you suggest books to prepare students to take certification tests such as A+, Network+, or others? Any textbooks we use would need to cover quite a breadth of material, such as PC hardware, operating systems, networking, security, and more."
Re:paper is overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
It has a problem with presenting facts in an orderly manner and often won't elaborate on some of the more advanced topics.
Re:paper is overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
(dont take that too personally, we've all won that at one time or another)
Personally, I think books are great. They can provide in-depth look at a focused topic. The internet, on the other hand, is (generally) more of a mass collection of tidbits of information. Both have their usage.
I also am a big fan of unchaining from the desk. It's good for your health, your eyes, and your sanity. And I find it easier to lug a book around on the subway then trying to connect to the unavailable internet on a lap heater.
YMMV
As to the topic though, I am not sure how useful it is to learn computers in high school. I would hope there would be more of a college prep approach. However, I am not such a blind idealist that I believe every student will be going to college. Still, the question seems a bit idealist itself -- to think a single class in computers at the high school level would prepare a student to enter a professional workforce seems a stretch. But I may be over-analyzing it.
Do you really think it is the case... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, there's always new stuff, but it's more important to have a good grasp of the fundamentals than to know the latest buzzword bingo stuff that probably won't last long anyhow.
Re:paper is overrated (Score:2, Insightful)
'search effectively'... for you as a teacher that's the 'book' you need.
Printed textbooks aren't a device for 'learning', they are a device for you to benchmark and evaluate student progress against (unfortunately this doesn't usually relate to real-world requirements) ... learning is about discovery... and the web rightly or wrongly is the most open form of discovery available â" you just have to work out what the 'fit' is in the classroom environment.
BTW most kids out of school we employ (20+ a year) get training in the task we want them to do. Smart Asses who 'know how to do stuff' usually have a career lifespan of a week. Those who 'want to do stuff' last a lifetime. I know this cause I got employed out of school 20 years ago and I'm now the boss... and I love my job.
Re:High School Graduate Computer Careers? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're absolutely right, stop teaching tech entirely, train them how to work at McDonalds till they are 35, then start teaching them Tech... cause we all know teaching an old dog new tricks is easy.
Infact, don't even teach them a spoken language until they are 19, would save all that back talking. ...
Yeah, most, probably nearly all wont find a job that suits there skills immediately, but pretty much no one does right out of highschool regardless of what they might have specialized in... but if they dont start in high-school (or earlier) how do you expect them to get into college/university for something they like? "I'd like to be here, seems cool" doesnt get you anywhere if you can't show some sort of competence...
Notice the "enter" and "start"... in your quote, doesnt mean they will get hired being a full-time anything, they have to work their way up just like anyone/other job.
Re:High School Graduate Computer Careers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:paper is overrated (Score:2, Insightful)
ALICE! (Score:2, Insightful)
Science, not engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
While you're in a great position to educate students with regards to computers and in reality, you could even prepare them for A+ and even Cisco or Juniper certification before they leave school, I believe that you should take advantage of the opportunity instead to teach them general computer knowledge and not specialized.
I have worked indirectly with CompTIA and have even assisted in writing books for A+ certification, but I prefer to believe that students taking courses voluntarily in high school should be directed towards higher education in computer science instead of providing them with a certification track that could allow them to go straight to work after high school. I believe that the A+, Network+, CCIE etc... track is great for guys that never got the higher education and want to work their way up the food chain without going to the university at the age of 30.
Don't get me wrong, preparing kids to take a CCIE which would get them $85,000-$125,000 a year the moment they graduate high school sounds great, but if they were able to achieve that by the time they left school, they could achieve so much more with a few years in the University.
Now, if you're teaching in a place where the students might otherwise be doomed to a life working in factories in dead end jobs, or in a place where the percentage of students continuing to higher education is disappointing, you would do them a great favor preparing them for certifications and careers straight out of high school. But if you make it obviously profitable for students to just ditch college and the university because they are certified for jobs right out of high school, then you could in fact be robbing the world of the valuable resources of higher educated scientists.
Teach the students computers as a science at the high school level, not as an engineering skill. If you're teaching at a proper (meaning public) high school as opposed to a vocational school, then computers should be approached in the same way as physics, biology or chemistry.
The students should leave your class knowing where computers come from, they should understand the history of computers. Maybe you should try to teach a limited set of electronics including discreet math (or just general boolean logic), you could even communicate with the local junior college and find out if you can design a credit track where you can use their curriculum to allow students to take college level 1st and 2nd year courses in high school and then take their finals at the college. This is actually how my high school worked and because of that many of the students continued on to New York Institute of Technology with 90% of their first two years of university credits completed.
Well, that was my two cents... I hope you find a good path to follow.
P.S. - if you do end up going down the certification track instead, please choose useful ones. A+ and Network+ are for guys driving silly vans to peoples houses with stupid names like Geek Squad. They're the fat assed, butt crack hanging out of their jeans plumbers of the computer business.
Re:paper is overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
What good is a perfected worded book that is four or more years old, and irrelevant compared to internet resources, as the summary informs?
Maybe we need an IT-wiki-ebook.
Books 4 years old and you're complaining??? (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, how long do you think it takes for a book to get to market? Between 6 months and a year it's still brand spanking new.
Secondly, even in computing good books become classics - Think K&R for C programming.
Thirdly, newer books often just make minor modifications to the old text. Hell some just renumber pages to keep up sales. (Hell some teachers re-use course notes for years in a row at a time with little revision).
Fourthly, 5 year old skills are still useful. Few if any companies are using bleeding edge stuff exclusively.
Then there's the Net which is a great resource. There are a ton of free tutorials on the web for various things.
If you've got access to 4 year old books and the Net, quit whining and looking for the most up to date books. You might as well ask for a pony.
Re:Write your own (Score:5, Insightful)
Unkind, uncalled for, and incorrect to boot.
Seriously: A) Homeschooling - not a perfect solution to the INCREDIBLY complicated problem of getting kids educated. In many cases, not a good solution. And, fyi, public school teachers build curriculums. So do private school teachers.
B) You kill your own argument by pointing out that "used the book as a foundation." He still used the book. He still needed the book. And why? Because a quality textbook is one of the most useful and powerful tools for both guided and self-directed learning. Because trying to learn anything without some sort of organized reference is maddeningly difficult. Because, I don't know, a teacher only has so much time with the kids, and they need more information than he can fit into one hour (maybe 1.5) per weekday.
Your argument (such as it was) demolished, I turn to motivation. What the hell is wrong with you? You see a question about relative quality of textbooks, and think "OHMYGOD, A CHANCE TO BASH TEACHERS AND UNIONS AND PROMOTE HOMESCHOOLING BECAUSE I'M THE SECRET LIBERTARIAN GOD-PRINCE!!!1!"
If you want to run an opinion blog, do so. But leave people who are trying to find ways to teach children better in peace, dude.
Re:paper is overrated (Score:3, Insightful)
And I can remember that just fine, as it was last Friday. So what?
If it works for you, great, but don't assume it does for everyone.
FAIL (Score:5, Insightful)
.. the third class should prepare juniors and seniors to enter the workforce and start a career in computers.
The point of high school is not (or should not be) to prepare kids to be mindless worker drones. The point of high school is (or should be) to give them a good, basic education.
Re:High School Graduate Computer Careers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are any employers anywhere willing to hire high schoolers in any tech jobs in today's economy?
Ar any employers anywhere willing to hire college educated individuals in any tech jobs in todays economy?
Re:FAIL (Score:4, Insightful)
The point of high school is not (or should not be) to prepare kids to be mindless worker drones. The point of high school is (or should be) to give them a good, basic education.
what a quaint starry-eyed aspiration.
sadly, it hasn't been true since the record was the dominant audio medium.
Back then they taught a good, well rounded education.
This included math, science, and all that other "good stuff", but also things like shop which helped people build and maintain their own furnishings and tools.
Shop went the way of the dodo (I wonder how many lobbies benefitted from that), and now PE and art are following.
Re:Abandon A+ (Score:5, Insightful)
In my area, there are virtually no computer repair shops left.
That is because the repairs (Windows bugs) have become too complex to effectively troubleshoot and repair. To do the job right requires too much time for which you can't bill. After spending a day attempting to recover a Windows box without a reformat, I learned the level of futility. I now too, reformat, reinstall when working with Windows boxes. The software is too complex to repair after a modern malware attack.
The amount of undocumented crap that can hose the sytem is too great.
Here is a typical reason to reformat instead of repair..
1 factory Windows XP install
1 aftermarket freeware photocopier (Scanner to printer)
1 demo factory loaded photo editor
Photocopier works fine, until the need arose one day to crop a photo to post online.. Tried the default photo editor.. the 30 day trial expired a year ago, would you like to spend $$$ for the full version? No.
Now the photocopier is broken. Attempts to photocopy simply launch the dead photo editor as it hijacked the TWAIN driver and launches upon any scan. Removing the photo editor does not fix the photocopier. Windows reports the photo editor is missing, would you like help searching for it?
How to fix??? How much time would be required to find where the TWAIN driver has been repointed. It's buried in the registery and not documented.. It's reformat to fix. Anything else is a massive waste of time.
The wife doesn't want to lose her settings and email so this has been broken for about 2 years. Photocopier functions and photo editing is done on the Linux box now because it works.
The wife is migrating away from Windows as it decays and she too looks for the tools that work.
To learn to like Linux, simply use Windows for a while.
Are you sure you've got the right focus? (Score:1, Insightful)
If your goal is to get these kids 'ready for the workforce' as juniors or seniors in highschool, you may want to focus on data entry and technical writing, or perhaps following pre-made guides to fix/replace known hardware and software problems.
Realistically though, you are not going to prepare them for the workforce at this point if you're trying to teach them about, "hardware, operating systems, networking, security, and more." That is, frankly, remedial, and outside of certain scopes, the average worker does not use it at all.
The only ones able to go into the workforce at that point will have already taught themselves, and you can't easily 'teach' interest.
As for certifications - most of which are not actually worth anything in the real world except when comparing lists of identically-qualified individuals for a call or initial interview. Not useless, but not great. You'll still need experience to even attempt to compete, unless it's an entry level job. Do not teach these if you can help it.
Now, let's step back a bit. What is your real focus?
Is it REALLY to get them ready to go to work, to have marketable skills? If so, your best bet is - sadly - to find a book on excel and/or powerpoint. They don't need a copy for themselves - in fact, they shouldn't have one. Just make sure they know how to google/use the built in help, because it's more valuable to teach them how to find info, than how a single version of a single app works. Half your class will likely be bored because it's too easy, and the other half will never understand if someone else doesn't show them exactly what to type. ... however, powerpoint and excel go a long way in almost any office position. There's many books on learning Office apps, so take your pick there.
On the other hand, if your goal is to get them ready to go to college and become involved in the IT industry post-degree, that's better - but harder. I would recommend picking a scripting language and show them the basic concepts you can find in any "Intro to Computer Science"-style book, regardless of the language it uses. Perl and Ruby might be a good choices, as they're somewhat forgiving. Granted, you may want to even try JavaScript, so all your examples/homework can (easily) be performed in a web page and thus graphical and more interactive. The downside to all of this is - it'd probably be difficult to find a book to help you out. I can't think of one that would give you a lesson plan. You'd be tasked with doing much of the legwork yourself.
Still, I think that would be the most valuable route.
Re:Write your own (Score:5, Insightful)
You can be pissed all you want that homeschooling is more successful than public schools at giving kids a good education
That's far from the truth.
There are certainly many success stories from homeschooling, but consider the inputs: those kids are motivated students from generally affluent families whose parents are themselves sufficiently sophisticated to prepare a curriculum. There was never really any doubt about the success of their education. The benefit comes from individual attention and self-pacing, which isn't a benefit of homeschooling but rather of class sizes you and your crackpot instruction.
For every "success", there's a sadly manipulated child as well as a total failure to go along with him. Saying that homeschooling is the answer is disingenuous at best. Few parents are sufficiently skilled or knowledgeable to complete an entire primary and secondary education.
If they are as good as they claim at educating, they should be able to write a decent text book.
Spoken like someone who truly fails to understand what a teacher is for. Educating isn't simply feeding data. Being able to write a textbook is an entirely different skill from being able to help students apply that information. You don't ask the race car driver to build the car. Even being an expert in a particular field does not mean you can write an effective textbook about it.
Just look at all the professors who are brilliant theorists and scholars but terrible instructors.
Don't Underestimate Paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the choice, I prefer a paper source over an internet link nine times out of ten. A good book, properly indexed, is almost always superior to someones personal page or site on a topic. There are exceptions, but overall books offer better presentations. The physical format of a book is also easier on the eyes, and more accessible than a computer monitor.
Hyperlinks are all very well for wiki-trips, but wiki-trips are really more for general knowledge learning. The question of the credibility of information on the internet also refuses to go away. Everyone by now has encountered information on wikipedia they know to be wrong or misleading. The same goes for websites. I don't mean to say that books and printed materials intrinsically have more credibility. But it's usually higher for them, though not by an order of magnitude.
If you want specific, detailed information and training on a topic, you need to read a book.
Re:paper is overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see your point, but I can't actually remember when I last broke the spine of a non-fictional book to glean some information. In the real world the computing students will be much better off learning HOW to find the information they need that being handed a book filled with information, most of which is probably not even relevant to the tasks they'll be given.
This demonstrates the common misconception that the internet is full of useful and accurate information.
Textbooks have one major advantage over web pages. They have been through an editorial process. I know sites like Wikipedia do as well, but since one of their 'professors' turned out not even to have an undergrad degree, and they are all anonymous, that leaves a lot to be desired on the authenticity front.
Wikipedia's version of peer review is equally suspect. Peer review without identification of peers to the author is ok, but when the identity of the author whose work is being reviewed is also hidden, and the peer reviewers have no need to account for their suitability to act as reviewers the process becomes little more than a parody of the true process.
Its also my experience that a great deal of information on the web is copied from what people have read in books anyway.
Some sites, like IBM, Sun, Microsoft and other companies with a vested interested in programming do provide useful online resources, but they also produce books.
I reject utterly the argument that computing books are out of date the moment they are printed. I have textbooks dating back ten years which still contain information I use often. Just because some small aspects of a subject may change does not invalidate all previous information on the subject.
This is especially true of books which seek to teach the basics of programming. You could pick up a book produced a few years ago, use that exclusively for months, and come out of the other end with a sufficient understanding of the fundamentals to grasp any recent changes it didn't cover. Such books tend to cover such fundamentals that they don't go out of date too fast. If your language of choice wasn't one being used as a marketplace lever (Java and C# for example), this is even more likely to be the case.
I personally use a mix of online and printed word resources. Only rarely do I stray from sites where the author is identified by name, I prefer to take my information from resources where the author has at least felt enough responsibility for their work to take credit for it.
Re:Write your own (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in the mainstream mediums, although sometimes they get it wrong and have to post a correction in the erratums column.
Re:Write your own (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, most home-schooled children outperform non home-schooled children in academics, and are more socially well-adjusted than non home-schooled children.
[Citation Required]
Re:Do you really think it is the case... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course a computer class changes much more often, though the basics (and that's what you want) change much less often. Keep the basics and update hardware specs and you have everything you need.
If what you want is a programming course, you could take a look at the python programming language. It's easy to learn the syntax and quite powerful. Also, there are many free (and good) textbooks available online, like the Python tutorial itself and Dive Into Python [diveintopython.org]
Re:paper is overrated (Score:2, Insightful)
Do Slashdotters have any favorite textbooks that can help kids on their way to becoming junior sysadmins, programmers, networking professionals, etc.?
Why are high school students being trained to be junior sysadmins, programmers, networking professionals? Teach the students to think, problem solve, and communicate verbally and especially in writing. It is difficult enough for IT professionals to find meaningful, gainful employment in IT these days. Are these students willing to compete with outsourced labour in India?
Re:High School Graduate Computer Careers? (Score:1, Insightful)
the third class should prepare juniors and seniors to enter the workforce and start a career in computers.
Are any employers anywhere willing to hire high schoolers in any tech jobs in today's economy?
Clearly you've never seen the sacrifices made in business every day exchanging well-paid experienced personnel for someone who barely qualifies but will work for $9/hour.
Well, I think you need to establish educational (Score:3, Insightful)
goals.
Certification training is only one kind of education, and not particularly important for people who are five to eight years from entering the work force. Of course, computer science is a practical field, but knowing the underlying theory is kind of the point of pre-professional education.
Thinking back over my own history, I think the most important book I ever read was Kernighan and Pike's The Unix Programming Environment. This was a wonderful book, in that it was extremely practical, but at the same time introduced readers gently to things like lexical analysis and parsing. The world would be different if everybody who ever went overboard for XML had read that book. I also recommend K&R's The C Programming Language, even though it is not a theoretical book, simply because it is exceptionally well written and clear. Programming is a fundamental skill, and it's good to learn from clean, well thought out examples.
Perhaps, the shortest advice is anything with Brian Kernighan as an author. Software Tools by K & Plaugher was very influential in my thinking, although the whole "software tools movement" never took off the way its proponents hoped. I don't know what recent editions are like, but these books have practical examples that illustrate important ideas.
Other really good texts, although far to advanced for high school, would be Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, and Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Lieserson, Rivest and Stein.
In the end, I would look for books that have a practical syllabus (if you will) that illustrates important theoretical ideas. If students entered CS knowing how to write a fairly clean C program, if they knew how to write a simple grammar that could be parsed by recursive descent, if they could do a simple object oriented design (perhaps Mr. Bruce Eckels' books, which are available online for free would be good here), if they could write both simple filter programs as well as programs that run in a more nondeterministic style, they'd be ahead of where a lot of people coming out of CS programs are.
Re:Write your own (Score:5, Insightful)
from Wikipedia, in a sourced section of the article:
Test results
Figure 2. Home School Students Compared to the National Norm Group in Grade Equivalent Units, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives.
Figure 2. Home School Students Compared to the National Norm Group in Grade Equivalent Units, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives
Figure 1. Academic Achievement of Home School, Catholic/Private and the Nation's Students, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives
Figure 1. Academic Achievement of Home School, Catholic/Private and the Nation's Students, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives
Numerous studies have found that homeschooled students on average outperform their peers on standardized tests.[52][53] Home Schooling Achievement, a study conducted by National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), supported the academic integrity of homeschooling. Among the homeschooled students who took the tests, the average homeschooled student outperformed his public school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points across all subjects. The study also indicates that public school performance gaps between minorities and genders were virtually non-existent among the homeschooled students who took the tests.[54]
As for social adjustment:
John Taylor later found, using the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale, "while half of the conventionally schooled children scored at or below the 50th percentile (in self-concept), only 10.3% of the home-schooling children did so."[57] He further stated that "the self-concept of home-schooling children is significantly higher (and very much so statistically) than that of children attending the conventional school. This has implications in the areas of academic achievement and socialization, to mention only two. These areas have been found to parallel self-concept. Regarding socialization, Taylor's results would mean that very few home-schooling children are socially deprived. He claims that critics who speak out against home schooling on the basis of social deprivation are actually addressing an area which favors home schoolers.[57]
Opposition to homeschooling comes from varied sources, including some organizations of teachers and school districts. The National Education Association, a United States professional association and union representing teachers, opposes homeschooling.[70][71]
Of course there are those who oppose homeshooling:
Opponents of homeschooling state concerns falling into several categories: standards of academic quality and completeness; (Notice they don't like measurements, only vague suspicions)
(continued...)reduced funding for public schools; (ahh! here we come to the crux of the matter)
lack of socialization with peers of different ethnic and religious backgrounds; (but they fail to cite)
fear of religious or social extremism; (OMG! Are they *religious*? Oops - "Reason for homeshooling: Can give child better education at home - 48.9% with an error of 3.79")
that homeschool curricula often exclude critical subjects; (not cited)
that parents are sheltering their children, or denying them opportunities that are their right such as social development, or providing an unfair advantage over students whose parents lack the time or money to homeschool; existence of parallel societies not fitting into standards of citizenship and national community. [72]
This is actually hilarious, because the article cites thi
Re:paper is overrated (Score:2, Insightful)
Even C# isn't bad if you're just learning to program. Early books on C# (some written while .Net was still in beta/RC stage) are still relevant for most of what people are going to do with the language. Anyone with no programming experience whatsoever will pick up plenty of useful information from even 6-year-old books on the language. Once they're competent with C# and .Net 1.x, they would simply need to learn the additions for 2.x and 3.x, if they were going to use those additions at all. There aren't a lot of changes to the core 1.x functionality, and it can all still be used against the .Net 1.x runtimes.
What I've really found difficult with C# programming is the lack of really solid books on .Net itself, especially dealing with ASP.Net and ADO.Net. Basically once you're at the point of dealing with these parts of the framework (where things do tend to advance more quickly), you're left with scouring web resources for little nuggets of useful information in a sea of garbage.
Of course, I still believe in learning programming by starting with a more static language like C or C++ that spends a lot more time in the standardization bodies before being updated. The usefulness in the workforce may be less clear, as people are hiring more web developers than systems developers, but it will give the students a good foundation from which to learn.
Then again, schools seem to be moving more towards the focus of getting students into the workforce than life-long learning, even at the college level.
Re:paper is overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
What good is a perfected worded book that is four or more years old, and irrelevant compared to internet resources, as the summary informs?
For high school classes, printed books of that age are just fine. How much have Windows, Mac, and even Linux changed in the last four years? Not enough to wipe away the basics. Look at the established reference for TCP/IP: it's nearly 15 years old. If they're teaching programming, a four-year-old textbook would be new enough for the basics of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, HTML, and a long list of other languages.
Relevance does not require the absolute latest version of everything, especially when preparing for the business world, where the version in use of a given program or language is often 3+ years old.