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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?
Just saving RMS the trouble.
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I was sorely tempted to register it just now.
I resisted the temptation.
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fuck logged in shitbags. fuck off. fuck. fuck. fuck.
Luke.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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...
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
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.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
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.
Video Game cheats, hints a
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.
Probably not, but we're going to take you through the movie anyway. Grab a bucket of popcorn and prepare yourself for the movie review of Star Wars: Episode II - The Attack of the Clones.
So the movie starts off with the requisite main score while the oddly skewed yellow text brings us up to speed on the goings-on in the galaxy. Something about unrest in the Senate, a separatist movement led by a "Count Dookie", Amidala being a Senator herself, yada yada yada. The main message is that the forced-perspective text looked lame as fuck in 1977, and seems downright abysmal 25 years later. One would think that with all the billions Lucas has made on the previous films he could afford a decent title sequence.
True to a movie made for kids and dysfunctional adults, we then jump right into the action. Senator Amidala is getting off her liqui-chrome spaceship on Coruscant when... kaboom! ...she blows up. Omigod, is she dead?!? Of course not, it was her stand in (you
remember her from Episode I, right?). This scene provides a great opportunity
for Natalie Portman to get all weepy
over her dead assistant and show us that Amidala
even cares for the little people. What an angel.
After that we see Yoda, Samuel "Mace Windu" Jackson and some freaky looking alien Jedi talking to Darth Sidious. Er, um, I mean Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who of course is in no way connected to Mr. Sidious. I mean, he's obviously a good guy, right? Yeah, sure. If you paid any attention to Episodes IV-VI you already know who he is. Also, those subtle facial expressions and tones of voice suggesting devious intentions sure do lend an air of, shall we say, insidiousness, to him.
So do the Master Jedi Knights pick up on Palpatine's two-faced treachery? No. The eight year-old kids at the theater see it plain as day, but to the leaders of the Jedi Council, people who have undergone the most stringent of training for detecting such duplicity, people who have freakin' powers of mind control and are sitting right across the desk from this guy, to them Palpatine seems A-OK.
Anyway, the whole point of this scene is to set up Obi-Wan "Ewen McGregor looks goofy in a beard" Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker as Amidala's bodyguards since it seems like somebody is trying to kill her. Of course it is Palpatine who suggests this. My goodness, what sort of deviltry is he up to? We also briefly see Jar-Jar Binks stroll by in the background. No lines for him in this scene, though.
Prior to Amidala getting hooked up with her Jedi, we get to meet the two of them alone in an elevator. Anakin is now a moody teen and his pining for Natalie Portman's firm buttox is quite apparent. When the elevator door opens they are greeted by Jar-Jar and... he speaks! Nothing like a little racist, neo-Jamaican patois to tickle the funny bone.
Once the whole gang is reunited all the complex character development gets dumped, wholesale, in about 45 seconds of screen time. Obi-Wan is the wise yet caring teacher, Anakin is straining under the throes of pubescent hormonal lust and good old rebellion, while Amidala is distant yet maternal in her care for Anakin. Jar-Jar appears to be little more than house nigger.
The next scenes begin to suggest why Lucas chose Attack of the Clones as title for this movie. All of the visual imagery was stolen from other people's films. The super-dense high rise cityscape, complete with moody nighttime lighting through half-open blinds, is equal parts Blade Runner and The Fifth Elephant to such an obvious degree that it is painful. We get to zoom about this impossibly crowded aerial metropolis at high speeds in a futuristic flying car chase. It's all Luc Besson at this point, including people falling from building to vehicle. You could swap Hayden Christensen (Anakin) with Bruce Willis at any point and the transition would be seamless (admittedly, replacing McGregor with Milla Jovovich might be noticed).
During this chase Anakin and Obi-Wan banter amusingly and offer flip one-liners. It almost works, but not quite. After the necessary crash to end the pursuit we swing fully into Ridley Scott's corner with teeming ground-level streets and a seedy bar full of oddly dressed people.
There's some sort of plot development going on through all this, but it's not very important. What is important is that this movie tries very hard to drop little nuggets of joy for the aging Star Wars fan base. The first one occurs outside the aforementioned bar when a bounty hunter who looks an awful lot like the Boba Fett of Episodes IV-VI kills somebody and then zooms off with his nifty jet pack. It is at this point where the first real signs of plot strain begin to show.
Now for some reason Obi-Wan is going to a mysteriously undocumented planet to investigate whatever the hell it is that we're supposed to care about, while Anakin stays behind to give the screenwriter a convenient opportunity to have Amidala reciprocate Anakin's puppy love.
The mystery planet is actually a sterile looking clone factory run by tall, lizard necked folks. Hard to say which movie set is being cloned, since the sterile, white, space-based science facility has been done so many times before. It's probably safe to credit Kubrick with being the biggest victim of theft here. All the clones themselves look vaguely ethnic. Additionally, they are apparently the precursor to Stormtroopers. Basically, at the factory they quickly breed a bunch of brown-skinned people who are literally identical looking, dress them up in white armor, and now they represent a huge, sinister force. What exactly is George Lucas trying to say here?
The lizard-necked scientists are a bit daft and don't realize they are revealing details to the wrong person when they tell Obi-Wan that the clones were ordered 10 years ago by a supposedly long-dead Jedi. They are also oblivious to the error of revealing the presence of a bounty hunter and his cloned "son", named Jango and Boba Fett, respectively, at the station. People in technical professions like genetics and computer science are often socially and politically clueless that way, resulting in atrocities like nuclear weapons and peer-to-peer file sharing.
Jango and Obi-Wan have a tense little meeting where more plot details of some sort are revealed, including the fact that all the clones look just like Jango himself, and then they get into a fight. Neither one of them dies though, so they chase after each other in space ships instead.
Back in the world of sappy love stories, things are progressing quite slowly. Anakin is still behaving like the sort of teen you'd send to military school as punishment. This brings to mind another apparent failing of Jedi University. If they're so great at molding super-competent Jedi, how come they can't raise a teenager who isn't a whiny little brat?
Amidala stays cold and distant to the advances of "Ani", and it's hard to see how they're going to end up getting busy and squirting out two kids. Then, they kiss. Yes, that abruptly. First she couldn't care less, then she's probing for tonsils. Whatever caused her change of heart apparently got left on the editing room floor.
George Lucas seems to be awfully fond of himself, so eventually he starts cloning his own movies. First Anakin has a dream about his mother being in pain, so he disobeys his orders and goes off to help her (Luke, 1:2). Amidala tags along.
Of course helping Mom means dropping another joy nugget for the fans, so it's back to Tatooine yet again. We reminisce with Watto a bit, and then head out to an awfully familiar looking house. Yup, it's the same one where future whiny little Jedi wannabe Luke grows up, and we get to meet the aunt and uncle who will be so trivial in later movies. The plot strains become more noticeable.
But hey, what's the point of time spent on Tatooine of you don't get to see some Tusken Raiders? Seems they've kidnapped Anakin's mother, Shmi, so we get to bust a hang with a whole bunch of them. Hell, even the Jawas pop up for a cameo. Nothing like rehashing old ground when you can't come up with a decent plot device.
Oh yeah, Anakin's Mom dies in his arms just as he rescues her (how convenient), and then he goes bezerk and slaughters all the Tusken Raiders. Apparently this is bad. Even Yoda gets some negative Force vibes from it, and he's way on the other side of the galaxy.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan's story line isn't doing much better. Lacking anything more exciting to do in a space chase, they fly into an asteroid field. They even venture into an asteroid tunnel. To be fair though, the absolute coolest part of the whole movie happens in this scene. See, Jango Fett has these bomb thingies, and he's hurling them at Obi-Wan's ship. Whenever one of them hits an asteroid and detonates everything goes dead silent for a half second and then a wonderfully flanged and modulated kwaaang! rings out while a pale blue shock wave radiates through space. Hearing that sound is almost worth the price of admission.
Somehow Obi-Wan ends up on a droid factory planet pursuing Jango and Boba and he gets caught by the dread Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus/Saruman the White/Christopher Lee. Count Doofus tells him about some plot involving the Senate and the separatists that is entirely too confusing for this sort of movie. In short, he asks Obi-Wan to join him, and Obi essentially tells him to go fuck himself. Count Doodu responds to the snubbing by amassing a huge army of orcs, er, droids, and leaving Obi-Wan trapped in a tower until he is rescued by a giant owl.
Over on Tatooine, Amidala is revealing herself to be quite the mischievous little minx, and she talks Anakin into going to save Obi-Wan. They arrive at the factory and proceed to battle their way through the exact same sorts of choppy, bashing mechanical bits that so flummoxed Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest. R2-D2 has no problems with them though because he has jet packs. I don't recall him having jet packs before. I imagine they would have been very useful if he had managed to hang onto them for his later adventures.
I wish I could say C3PO did as well as R2, but his head gets lopped off and installed on one of those battle droids, while a battle droid's head gets stuck onto 3PO's ungainly frame. I don't want to ruin the movie, but I must tell you that much hilarity ensues from this manufacturing gaffe. But this movie isn't about droids, it's about clones, so let's get back to those.
The next clone returns us to Ridley Scott territory. Anakin and Amidala get captured, and are joined with Obi-Wan in a gladiator arena (yes, a gladiator arena) where they are forced to fight animals and robots to the death. It is at this point where Natalie Portman's midriff begins to receive significant screen time.
Things go well at first, then our protagonists get into trouble as the robots multiply. All seems lost until Samuel Jackson's bald head strides in, accompanied by a whole bunch of other Jedi. Jedi and robot go at it in great numbers and there's lots of glowing phalluses being wielded about and much carnage. Jango Fett flies on into the fray only to get beheaded by Mace Windu. His young clone Boba seems to find this upsetting, and presumably he'll be holding a grudge for some time over this.
Things go well (again) until our protagonists get into trouble (again) as the robots multiply (again). The next turn in the battle occurs when Yoda comes strafing into the arena with several ships loaded with clones and utters his most absurdly spoken line ever: "Around the survivors a perimeter create!" It made me want to beat Frank Oz to death with a copy of Labyrinth.
As the arena battle winds down and everybody leaves to chase the fleeing Count Dooker we see Boba Fett cradling his progenitor's severed head. Somebody should get the kid some counseling or he's going to have some real issues later on.
After a rolling battle across the plains of... whatever planet they're on ...Doochu gets cornered by Anakin and Obi-Wan. As anybody who's ever seen one of the other Star Wars movies can tell you, it's light saber time.
Anakin attacks. Anakin gets tossed in the corner like a sack of dirty laundry. Obi-wan attacks. Obi-Wan gets beaten down like a filthy Scottish actor. Anakin attacks again, this time in the dark and with two glowing phalluses! He looks a lot like one of those irritating Rave kids waving glowsticks about, but he must've forgotten to take his vitamin E because he gets his hand chopped right off. Yes, his hand. The right one. Just like his future son. Oh, the anachronistic irony! This is profound stuff.
Our protagonists are once again in trouble and all seems lost (again) until... ninja Yoda!
He comes hobbling in on his cane looking a bit feeble, but oh is he pissed. After a short hand gesturing bit of "My Schwartz if bigger than yours" they get down to the wand waving. But Yoda doesn't grab his saber. Nosirree, he telekenesifies it from his belt to his wrinkled green paw. Yoda is one bad mother fucker.
He flips, he spins, he darts through the air like a mosquito on crack. If you watch Iron Monkey on fast forward it still won't come close to the acrobatics of this little gremlin. However, he doesn't win. He's forced to chose between killing Count Doosey and saving the other two Jedi from a falling pillar, and he lets the Count go. Despite his ninja skills, Yoda is a humanitarian at the core. The next shot shows the Count flying away in a ship powered by some sort of solar sail (the "hard science" geeks are going to love that bit).
As the movie draws to a close we see Anakin flexing his new prosthetic hand, just like Luke does in Episode V. It might be chilling if it weren't so contrived. When a screenwriter/director has a decade and a half to come up with a prequel you would expect him to conclude with something a little less obvious. But, that's what you get when you focus on joy nuggets of nostalgia for a pathetic group of emotionally underdeveloped adults.
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
**Life is too short to be serious**
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!
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
~~~
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.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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
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.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
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.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
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.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
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
This sig is self referential.
-Lx?
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
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Hundreds of pages of good solid stuff available for free from here
Do the decent thing and buy a copy from the site though.