Think Python

An anonymous reader writes "In a neverending effort to spread the word about free quality online programming books, here is a Python programming book. 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python', by Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, and Jeffrey Elkner is a copylefted work available in multiple formats at Green Tea Press: HTML , PDF, LaTeX. Compliments of the online books what's new page."

Comments

Thanks to Online Books

[Taco Cowboy]

Thanks to Copylefted Online Books, I now can read the books before I buy.

On my bookshelf, seven of the books were bought after I read their online version.

I live in a third world country where there is no Towers bookstore, nor Borders, nor Barnes - there is NO WAY for you to know how good a book is without first buying the book - the bookstore here do NOT allow you to read the book !

The idea of Copylefted books really help me, and many others who are in the situation of buying books not knowing if the books are good or not.

Thanks again !

Re:Thanks to Online Books

[Gaetano]

Another option for you may be to subscribe to a service like Safari from oreilly. I subscribed and use it daily. Basicly you can check out books from oreilley and several other publisher for 45 days at a time (when you can then check them back in if you want another book).

Its not too expensive compared to how much technical books cost in some countries outside the US I have visited. The Safari service is about 10 dollars a month (US) for 5 books and 15 dollars for 10, and so on.

Re:How to think like a computer scientist

[affenmann]

I think part of the problem is the name `Computer Science', which gives a wrong impression of what the core of the poodle really is. That's like calling Astronomy `Telescope Science'. I have met so many people who didn't want to study CS at all - they just wanted to learn `installing Linux and setting up a web server'. This has regrettably put universities under pressure to change their curriculum...

Some universities (eg. Edinburgh) have started calling it `Informatics', which is much more appropriate. (In fact in Germany, and probably elsewhere, it was always called `Informatik'.)
Maybe there should be CS *and* Informatics.

Uhm, guess that was offtopic.

Did the author get paid?

[AmericanInKiev]

Does anyone know if the author of the book gets paid by Green Tea for donating or "copylefting" the book?

I'm working on the theory of collecting tax deductions for copylefted art, and this contribution is a great example because it closely resembles historically donated items. If the author donates the artwork to the right organization - he could by my reading of the IRS be paid in tax deductions.

Does anyone know of cases in Open Source / Copyleft where tax deduction are being used to help cover expenses?

I'm sure that the competition - i.e. Microsoft uses every tax deduction in the book. Are Open Source contributers playing by the same rules - or are we handicapping ourselves by ignoring the tax benefits of donation?

If anyone can provide examples of copylefted donations and how you documented it for tax purposes - I'm interested.

I believe there are Billions of dollars in potential government funding just waiting to be collected by Open Source artists. Lets go get it!

AIK

Re:Did the author get paid?

[sheldon]

I believe what you are on is the road to jail for tax evasion.

The IRS does not allow you to donate your time and deduct your perceived cost from your taxes. It's highly illegal because it is quite obviously prone to abuse.

So in the case of your artwork example. If you go out and buy a painting for $20,000 and then donate that painting to a non-profit charity, you may deduct the $20,000 or whatever the current market value is of that painting.

However if you go out and buy a canvas and some paints and then make your own painting to give to charity. The only thing you may deduct is the cost of the canvas and paints, i.e. the supplies. Now if you sold the painting at auction for $20,000 and then proceeded to give that $20,000 to charity, you may deduct the $20,000, but you're also showing the $20k as income so it's a net-zero-sum game.

The same is going to be true of a book.

Re:Computer 'Science'?

[panurge]

Many years ago I went for interview to the CS department of the University of Leeds, England. Things were going well until I asked the full professor interviewing me if we were going to learn anything about the hardware side of computing. He looked down his nose at me, drew in his breath and said "My boy, we don't concern ourselves with the doings of technicians". (Leeds is not precisely in the forefront of advances in modern computing.)
However, for the last hundred years or so it has really been increasingly difficult to separate science and engineering. More and more, scientific hypotheses can only be tested when sufficiently advanced engineering comes along. There have always been "whiteboard scientists" (i.e. theoreticians) who resent this.
But most great scientists were skilled engineers as well. Galileo, Newton, Bunsen, Babbage, Turing...

I think the terminology is the problem. We don't talk about "Physics science" or "Biology science", so why "computer science" or "rocket science"?
Why not just computing and rocketry?

While I'm having a rant, there's also a problem with degrading the word "engineer". MCSEs and such are basically technicians, not engineers. Perhaps if we admitted that the people who implement systems using standard components that just have to be set up correctly (although this may be a challenging role) are technicians, then we could accept that most "computer scientists" are actually trained as engineers, that this is a highly skilled and challenging professional role, and the number of real scientific researchers is not that great. Just like physics and chemistry nowadays, in fact.

I would suggest that the test of a pseudoscience is that it doesn't create a heirarchy of engineers and technicians because, basically, it doesn't work and there would be nothing for them to do. You don't get sociological engineers designing ever better societies, and socio-technicians building them just as fast as people can throw money at them. (At least, the attempts, such as Marxist-Leninism, have been abject failures). But you get plenty of sociologists. On this basis, computing, with its deep organisational structures, is an extremely successful science-based system. Arguments about testing hypotheses are irrelevant: real scientists tend not to work like that anyway.
Scientific proof has been conventionally about other people reproducing your results. But if the nature of your science/engineering is that you can rapidly produce millions of copies of your concept or invention, this becomes trivial. If I claim to have invented (say) a graphics chip architecture that can draw polygons twice as fast as the previous best for a given clock speed and die size, I prove this by marketing the product, not by publishing and waiting for other labs to build a copy and duplicate my result.

Re:How to think like a computer scientist

[JohnsonWax]

I think part of the problem is the name `Computer Science', which gives a wrong impression of what the core of the poodle really is.

Well, yeah.

I'd make the following analogies:

• Computer Science ~= Physicist
• Software Engineering ~= Electrical Engineer
• Informatics and Coders ~= Electronics Technician

CS is a science that deals with unravelling how information and logical systems function and developing frameworks to understand them. CS are most likely to determine the boundaries at which things can happen and to lay out how to practically approach that boundary.

Software Engineering is an engineering discipline that deals with manipulating those systems to perform a needed task. They take the work of the CS and design systems to address specific problems. Quick and dirty is just fine, provided that all the needs are being met.

Coders assemble the systems that the SEs design and informaticians maintain those systems.

There's overlap among all of them to some degree, and plenty of people do them all, but from an education point of view, if you mix them together, you get a mess - and most schools mix them together. It was easier to mix them in the past because the field was narrow. But now, you just can't do it.

CS has become very deep, and you can't get into any of the real work if you spend your time dealing with SE and coding practices. SE has become very deep as well and you don't want these folks getting bogged down with the NP completeness proofs and whatnot, or with learning the programming tools too much. There's enough to do in all three areas that they need to be treated as different but complementary disciplines...