Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
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
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."
So, what is the best way to learn Linux? How did you learn it?
Assuming this question isn't rhetorical, I'd just like to say something.
Linux is something that people who are passionate about computers and code are going to run across sooner or later. If you're lucky, maybe three kids out of a introductory class will have the sort of mindset conducive to exploring on their own. Most of them just want to play Quake, skip class, wear baggy trousers, and download copies of Win2k.
How do I know? I just took an introductory programming course. And I couldn't believe the sheer _apathy_ of the bulk of the students.
The first *nix I learned was NetBSD, then OpenBSD, and a little bit of Linux here and there. I learned it the same way most people do - indulgent friends, hours on Google, and having nothing better to do when I was working the night shift.
Most intro students don't care enough to bother. That's why telling them to RTFM won't work and that's why this question was asked.
--saint
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.
Hundreds of pages of good solid stuff available for free from here
Do the decent thing and buy a copy from the site though.