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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?
Assuming that we're also talking about introductory level courses here, some of the students in question may not be used to (or even capable of) learning that way. In those cases, having a good textbook for one-stop info shopping both in and out of class is not necessarily a bad thing. (I know that when I was learning Perl, the llama book was a godsend during that first week or two, particularly the exercises at the end of each chapter.)
Also, a good textbook can be the best defense against a bad instructor. (And best intentions aside, you'd be surprised how many of these there are out there.) If the professor is a wash, you can at least go off on your own and learn what's in the text. And if you're lucky enough to get a good instructor, she/he will likely use the text only as a starting point for even more in-depth discussions.
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.
Learn it, live it, love it.
Let me say it one more time, O'Reilly.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
Good instructors should be able to, yes. But, as I'm sure we can all attest to, you're not always guaranteed to get a good instructor. Or even a competent one.
I guess that I see the issue of instructor quality as orthogonal to the issue of textbook quality. A good instructor with a lousy textbook will still be able to teach a good class. And a good instructor with good resources (whether a textbook or otherwise), should be able to teach a great class.
On the other hand, if you've got a lousy instructor, the best textbook in the world isn't going to help you.
You're saying that if a student has a lousy instructor but a good textbook then they can go ahead and study the textbook on their own. I understand the point and obviously it's true in certain cases. But it seems to me that a student who is going to study the textbook on their own already has the resources to synthesize the disparate data sources. So it becomes a moot point: students who are self-directed enough to study a textbook on their own whon't be limited by a crappy instructor anyway.
That being said, I'm all for more and more resources of higher and higher quality. My point of contention is with the idea that a textbook, per se, is desirable. In general, textbooks provide breadth but not depth. If I recall correctly, you mentioned how "Learning Perl" was a lifesaver when you were in a Perl class with a lousy instructor. That's exactly my point. That book isn't a traditional textbook.
I'm really not trying to be argumentative. It's just that this is an issue close to my heart. I'm going to be a professor of sociology one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) and I'm committed to not using textbooks in my courses. (Besides the fact that most textbooks such, I believe that using original sources demonstrates to the class the discipline is really like. Yeah, assigning the original article requires more effort from the students but I think that they get so much more out of it than if they read a textbook's summary of it.)