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Linux Textbooks?
whymw asks: "I am a computer science instructor at our local community college where I teach an introductory level Linux course. Due to worries about Microsoft licensing, my director is interested in moving other courses such as office packages to the Linux environment. However this question keeps poping up - 'What would we use for textbooks?' There is little to pick from and I see this as a major barrier to widespread adoption of Linux in the classroom. Do we need to create a linuxtexts.org? Should openoffice.org fork off a textbook project? By the way, I said TEXTbook, complete with labs, assignments, and hopefully a testbank." Linux has to make it into the education market at some point. If there are no Linux textbooks out right now, what recommendations would you have from the current crop of off-the-shelf books?
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What is wrong with using non-textbooks and writing a lab manual with exercises. I have taken computer classes before that didn't use textbooks -- and I've taken classes that did use awful textbooks, where we would have been better off using a non-textbook.
As far as OpenOffice goes, I've just started using it after using Word for a long time, and I find it intuitive enough (and enough like Word) that a textbook on using it would be a waste of paper.
There are plenty of good FAQs out there, which are good learning resources. And isn't it the job of the instructor to design assignments, labs, and testbanks? In subjects other than the sciences, this is certainly the case, so I don't really see your concerns being a problem.
I know that the A+ Certification for Dummies has a test at the end of each chapter along with "walk along" projects. Maybe the Linux Certification for Dummies has the same thing. (plus it comes with a CD for students to learn). This would be an interesting class I would love to take!
Nic Farley
We used this in our intro to linux class... wasn't too bad. I don't know if it serves the purpose of having q/a in it as well, can't remember that far back ..
:(
You can check it out here, though I'm not sure if it's in print now...
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Teach them to use the docs or man-pages or whatever :) Teaching someone to find information on their own is an indespensible skill.
When I went to school, the focus was often on learning how to find the relevant information and apply it. What you are describing sounds suspiciously like rote-learning.
Our instructors, for the most part, designed and wrote all of the exercises and tests we did too (this was the Computer Engineering Technology program at SAIT in Calgary, Alberta). Additionally, if you rely on textbook exams for testing, you will see a lot of plagiarism and cheating - better to write the exams and exercises yourself and vary them class by class.
Rather than buying textbooks, convince the school to pay you to write them, along with creating test banks and exercises. If they own the copyrights, they can print off as many as they need and save a lot of money in the end (especially if they are a large school).
Many of my classes had textbooks, but a lot of them relied on in-house developed texts, especially when suitable textbooks didn't exist.
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I used to have a very good chemistry teacher who managed to teach us without textbooks for three years. He just made us write about three to four A4 sides of notes - so by the end of the year we had the equivalent of a textbook anyway! It also meant people actually learnt it rather than a textbook just getting dusty on a shelf.
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Use Microsoft books as an example of how not to do it.
You can't have an education course without some sort of standardization. A cartian math problem must always yeild the same result. Even if a school uses Visual Basic, the are standard procedures, with concrete outcomes.
Linux does not provide for this. Due to the nature of Linux's upbringing and existance, there is an amalgamation of solutions available for most given "assignments" were this to materialize.
This works very well for a good number of things.
The classroom, however, is not on of those.
Well none of these are "traditional" textbooks, they are all usefull sources of information.
Throw in a book about the GNU philosophy & history of linux, add another about linux security, and you're set.
I think that most of us on here are Programmers/Computer people. As a whole we are not like "other" people. We are happy to learn. To us to learn is natural. That said the vast majority of people work on a few simple rules.
1. It can not be my fault. If I can not do a task the task is too hard. It could never be that I did not try hard enought.
2. I can ask some lesser person the question. They know more than me because I am too busy with important stuff to know that stupid stuff they know.
To tell the real world to read faqs, write test banks, create exercises is not reasonable.
Actually I would love an Open office manual. I find there docs to be lacking. I am having a fit getting OpenCalc to talk to my postgresql database through ODBC.
I am sure that I can figure it out in time but most people want easy answers. Let's face it we all want easy answers. Come on someone out there could make some good money writeing Learn OpenOffice in 24 Hours and OpenOffice for Dummies.
The basic business model of Microsoft and friends is to sell software for a cost with lousy documentation and support so they are only too happy if there are a lot of 3rd party texts like XP for dummies (actually that title could mean a lot of things).
On the other hand the business model of Linux distributing companies is to give the software for free and earn on support so it doesnt really make sense for them to support 3rd party textboks which make the user self sufficient
Mind you here I am talking about lay users not programmers . Programmers would in any case get their support from usergroups not Red Hat
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There are lots of great textbooks on beginning UNIX, they don't have to be Linux specific. But when I taught a Linux class at a local trade school, I put together my own documentation. You can also visit The Linux Documentation Project where they have lots of guides and How-to's which most (if not all) are GPL'd and free to use.
As an academic myself, a few different issues spring to mind. I'll try to organize them in a somewhat coherent fashion.
First, I would ask if you really need textbooks? While most professors still use textbooks, a lot of people do fine without using any textbooks at all. Yes, it requires more effort on the part of the professor to research all of the sources themself; however, in my experience, the results are certainly worth it. Rather than teaching a politically-correct, watered-down course, you can tailor it to precisely what you feel is important. And shouldn't that be a professor's obligation anyhow?
For sources, I would start with the LDP, the FSF, O'Reilly, and Addison-Wesley. These guys easily make up over 95% of my tech bookshelf.
Addison-Wesley also does textbooks. I don't know how good they are but if they pay as much attention to their textbooks as they do to their IT texts, they'll be excellent.
On another matter, if you're going to consider rolling your own textbooks, don't reinvent the wheel. Much, if not most, of the documenation out there is under a free-as-in-speech license. Use it. Also, I don't think that you need to start your own website. I can't speak for the LDP but it seems to me that they would be delighted to assist you in developing the texts that you need.
Finally, if you go to the effort of developing all of this content, please do the right thing and share it with the community. Ideally, this would through a free-as-in-speech license.
It's practically axiomatic that you don't want to bombard the students with too much, too soon. So here's how I would do it (I'm someone who came to using Linux the self-taught way, so you may want to approach it differently).
I'd want to talk briefly - no longer than 30 minutes to an hour - about the Unix incompatibilities that arose in the 1980s, and how they led to Unix fragmentation. This would be a good set-up for compare-and-contrast exercises with, say, the Microsoft situation today, as well as Apple's Macintosh development. Most importantly, it leads you straight into short summaries of how and why Linux/BSD grew out of the chaos. Also, there's the historical section of the FreeBSD Handbook online -- it's pretty cool.
You don't have to get religious about using Linux or the BSDs; just demonstrate how they work and let your students decide for themselves if they like it or not.
In summary, there are a lot of books around. A search on Amazon will be much more complete than I could ever be, but I think this should give a few hints. Good luck!
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~~~
Many professors like to make their own textbooks so they can get more money anyway. Not only can you force your own books upon your class, but you might even be able to sell them outside of your own school. You are only looking at the time to create the books, as it seems the market is already there.
There are plenty of manuals out there to be used as a 'textbook' in a classroom. Linux+ is being offered at local community colleges in my area, and one college is about to start Solaris 8!(I know...it's not linux, but at least it's not M$). I would try and get Linux+ and or some of the LPI certifications offered at your CC.
We need to build a market for all those textbook writers to start caring about Linux. I would just use books you get from Borders, or Barnes'n'Noble and just make 1 or 2 books the "classroom manuals".
have you considered that linux is, in reality, just a variant of unix. so any textbooks for unix will work for linux. and since unix has been used in uni's for decades, i'm sure there are a few.
that said i didn't have many cs textbooks that mentioned any os. "the design and implementation of bsd 4.x" was about the only one i can think of. but then i graduated from uni 10 years ago as of 17/5. god that's depressing.
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I assume that teaching a few JC classes means you aren't into teaching for life, just for a little extra money. But in any event, why not write your own textbook? Don't know if any publisher would buy it, but you could at least force your own students to get it. Better yet, start a sourceforge project.
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This is a good point, most Linux orientated literature is techincal-based. I hadn't noticed this before as this is what I'd want anyway. However that's no good for people who just want to do basic user-end type stuff (word processing etc).
As someone who was required to take an Intro to Linux class in order to satisfy prerequisites, I can say from experience that Harley Hahn's Student Guide To Unix is an excellent textbook for such a class. While it's slightly outdated, the book did its job.
Check out this one : which includes practice tests, a study guide, etc. ...very nice.
So it's shameful self-promotion, but I wrote Think Unix so that it could be used effectively as a textbook.
There are practice problems scattered throughout each chapter, with answers in the back of the book. It's short enough to be used as the sole textbook for a seven-week Unix course, or as one of several books in a longer course.
And if a couple thousand Slashdot readers buy the book, I may one day make back my advance. :-)
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Copyright: 2002
Format: Paper, 678 pp
ISBN: 0-201-72595-9
Status: Published 07/02/2001
Retail Price: $52.00 US
I know nothing about this publication, but the table of contents suggests it covers the areas you want.
Our professor aloud us to do assignments on our own Linux boxes using for our Intro to Unix class. We used this book:
UNIX MADE Easy
It has individual chapters that goes over tools like vi, grep, using Korn and C Shells. As well as setting up printers. I enjoyed the book and it spells everything out for you. As well as example questions at the end of each chapter. I don't think it had a testbank though. You got to make that up yourself.
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I beleve behind the question of textbooks lies another, bigger question: what is the best method of teaching Linux? A textbook is a container of important data structured by the method of conveying it to the user.
So, what is the best way to learn Linux? How did you learn it? What was interesting?
man koffice | lpr
err, something like that
--m
why would you want to pay for text books if you didn't have to?
My class used Linux Installation and Administration, by Nicholas Wells...printed through Course Technology, I think. It was a pretty good book for an intro Linux course.
Why textbooks?
There are lots of reasons for wanting to have a pre-purchased textbook... here are a few that I can think of:
Having said all that you are correct in assuming that the instructor should design assignments and labs etc. but there are always core text books to refer back to and to look stuff up. A good textbook can become a core reference that can be relied apon to give the correct information, and is always there on your shelf. Unlike the web and howto's and FAQ's which can give the wrong answer, or just have disappeared over night.
Yes you should teach people to find out information on the web, and learn to read FAQ's but this is the wrong entry point for most beginners. Remember that people taking these kind of beginers courses could easily be the kind of people who cannot set the time on the VCR! You need to start with easy to use tools that people are used to, most people will have been taught from text books in the past and so will find it less intimidating if you provide them with a familiar method of learning.
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First you have to really ask what yo uare going to teach:
Linux is an open source kernel that comprises the core of an open source operating system.
The vast majority of the operating system and applications you use on what is typically called a "Linux" machine is written by GNU, and other open source projects (Xfree86, PERL, Samba, etc).
A book on Linux would be simple, it only covers the one small part of the operating system. What you are asking for is a single textbook that will cover all the disparate appliations on the system. To relate this to the "mainstream computing world" it would be like looking for a single text book that covers MSOffice, Windows, Windows Explorer, IIS, Photoshop, Flash and all the other applications and components of a Windows environment.
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LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell is very good, since it is preping you to certify for LPI 101 and LPI 102 it contains excersies and questions.
For Electronic references start here:
O'Reilly Open Books Project
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unfortunately, this particular type of subject matter is not particularly prone to having textbooks, esp. good ones. the BEST text (introductory) i have seen is actuall the dummy's book. it is informative, as well as an interesting read (some of the details at least). think of programming books: learn in 21 days!! most of those books are SHIT anyway, i always use the C bible when teaching. Usually, professors are better off having a GUIDE in the right direction as opposed to a rigid manual.
:(
last resort
man textbook:
No manual entry for textbook
too bad
QED
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Hundreds of pages of good solid stuff available for free from here
Do the decent thing and buy a copy from the site though.