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Five Free Calculus Textbooks
First-Year Calculus Notes author Paul Garrett pages 70 URL http://www.math.umn.edu/~garrett/calculus/ rating 7/10 summary Would make a good concise refresher.
The author provides this book in PDF format. As far as I can tell from the somewhat ambiguous notice on his web page, the book is intended to be licensed under the GPL copyleft license. That warms my heart as an open-source enthusiast, but it's slightly strange, for a couple of reasons. First, the GPL is a software license, and is less suitable as a copyleft license for books than the GFDL or a CC license. Also, the source code of the book isn't available (it appears to have been done in LaTeX), which I think makes it legally impossible under the GPL to redistribute the book, whereas the author's intent in GPL-ing it was presumably to make it freely distributable. Just as I was in the process of submitting this review to Slashdot, the author replied to an e-mail I'd sent him about this, and it sounds like he's interested in clearing up this issue, and really does want his book to be free as in speech.
This is a lively and very readable treatment of basic calculus. At 70 pages, it's a welcome antidote to the usual bloated textbooks, and the topics that are included match up pretty well with my own opinions of what it's really vital for a student to know after taking a calculus course. The tone is conversational without being condescending or cutesy, and the author almost always explains why he's introducing something, rather than just throwing it at the reader. (An unfortunate exception is the opening section on inequalities.) There is no attempt at rigor whatsoever, which I consider to be a feature, not a bug. Applications are discussed, although not enough for my taste (and I have to suppress my gag reflex every time I see a calculus book that insists on presenting the acceleration of gravity in non-metric units).
Although the book comes with some of the paraphernalia of a complete college textbook, such as homework problems, it's probably not the kind of book that another professor could just adopt as a stand-alone text, nor would I recommend it for someone learning calculus on her own for the first time. The title suggests that the author had in mind more of a memory aid, or a way to keep students from having to scribble madly in their notebooks for an hour and a half at a stretch. It lacks an index and illustrations, and there are some misfeatures in terms of organization: the chapters aren't numbered, and the homework problems are scattered around where they're hard to find. In some cases it sounds as though the first time a word or concept is used, he's assuming the reader has already heard it defined. I would, however, recommend this book to someone who needs to refresh her memory of calculus, and doesn't want to spend hours wading through epsilons and deltas to get to the highlights. It might also be a good option for the student who is completely broke, and needs a reference to use in place of an officially required text that carries an exploitative price tag. Although there are other calculus textbooks that can be downloaded without paying, this is the only one I'm aware of that follows the typical order of topics, and is also (AFAICT) copylefted, so that we can be assured it needn't evaporate if the author signs a publishing contract, or loses interest in maintaining his web site.
Difference Equations to Differential Equations: An Introduction to Calculus author Dan Sloughter pages 600 URL http://math.furman.edu/~dcs/book/ rating 6/10 summary Takes too long to get there.
Like Garrett's text, this one appears to have been done in LaTeX, is licensed under the GPL, and appears to suffer from the same legal problems, because it's not available in source form.
The book is well written, and seems to have been well designed for practical classroom use. The approach is visual and intuitive, and there are lots and lots of graphs and numerical calculations. I felt, however, that it took a long time to get going, and the idiosyncratic selection of topics might make it difficult to use at many schools. Although the very first page gives a nice clear explanation of what calculus is about, we then have to wait until about page 136 to learn any calculus. I say "about" because of the inconvenient way in which the book is split up into 54 separate PDF files, each of which has page numbers starting from 1. I had to estimate page number 136 by weighing part of the book on a postal scale. Related to this problem is the fact that the book has no index or table of contents.
The book uses many numerical examples, which gives it a modern feeling . After all, calculus was invented by Newton and Leibniz because they needed to do calculations in closed form, but nowadays it's more natural to solve many problems on a computer, using a spreadsheet or a programming language. The book has a problem, however, in integrating the computer stuff with the didactic parts and the homework problems. No indication is given of how the numerical examples were actually computed. The author may consider it a trivial task to set up a spreadsheet or write a ten-line program in Python or Mathematica, but it's not so trivial for many students, and they will need extensive guidance from elsewhere to be able to carry out such computations for themselves. This makes the text incomplete in practical terms: any instructor wanting to use it would have to come up with extensive support materials to go with it. It also contributes to my sense that the book lacks focus. Students have a hard enough time learning the basic concepts and techniques of integration and differentiation, but to use this book, they would also have to learn about computer programming and difference equations. Adding to the bloat is the author's tendency to discuss every possible pathological case before moving on to the main event. It's a little like a parent trying to explain sex to his child, but feeling obliged to explain foot fetishes before getting on with where babies come from.
The examples that students are expected to do numerically also presuppose quite a bit of resourcefulness and insight. For instance, one of the homework problems asks the student to sum the series 4(1-1/3+1/5-1/7+...) numerically, adding up "...a sufficient number of terms to enable you to guess the value of the sum," which turns out to be pi. The trouble is that over 600 terms are required to get the sum to settle down in the second decimal place, which is about the minimum I'd want to see to convince me it was pi. Pity the poor student who first tries 10 terms on a calculator, then 50 terms on a spreadsheet, and then finally realizes he's going to need to write a Python program to get the job done. Of course, some students might enjoy the process, but my experience (teaching college science majors taking introductory physics) is that the majority don't consider computers to be fun.
Lectures on Calculus author Evgeny Shchepin pages 143 URL http://www.math.uu.se/~oleg/ShchepinCalc.html rating 2/10 summary Not for consumption by mere students.
This book is from a set of lectures on calculus given by visiting professor Evgeny Shchepin at Uppsala University in 2001. The first obstacle potential readers will encounter is that the book is provided in PostScript format, with hideous bitmapped type 3 fonts embedded. This makes it virtually impossible to view the book on a monitor in any legible representation, although it looks fine when you print it out. The typical Windows or MacOS user will give up long before that point. This is a shame, because it's not at all difficult these days to get LaTeX to output Adobe Acrobat files that are viewable on virtually any computer, and are legible on the screen. There is no index, and virtually no graphs or other figures.
The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written. This deep, dark forest of mathematical symbols, interspersed with ungrammatical English, is meant to follow the historical development of the subject, but it never makes it clear why the historical route is the right one to follow. There are many seemingly pointless digressions.
Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course? The presence of end-of-chapter homework problems would seem to imply that it was. If so, I feel sorry for them. Although it's cute that the author manages to develop integrals before limits, and derivatives only at the very end, I somehow doubt that real, live students would read this book and exclaim, "We sure are lucky to be learning calculus using this novel order of topics!" Most of the problems begin with the words "Prove that...," and neither the text nor the problems give any of the standard applications to biology, economics, physics, etc.
Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals author Jerome H. Keisler pages 992 URL http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html rating 10/10 summary I wish I'd learned calculus from it!
Textbooks are usually unoriginal, because most teachers are conservative in their choices. They get used to teaching a subject a certain way, and don't want to change. This is a calculus textbook with a very unusual approach. It was published in 1976, and evidently was successful enough, despite its idiosyncracy, to justify a second edition a decade later. Its publisher, however, eventually allowed it to go out of print. The copyright has reverted to the author, and he has made it available in digital form on his web site. The digital book consists of pages scanned in from a printed copy and assembled into an Acrobat file, so it's a big download, and you can't do some things with it, such as searching the text for a particular word.
The title leaves no doubt that the book is different. Whereas most textbooks these days define derivatives and integrals in terms of limits, this one uses infinitesimals. The real numbers are generalized to make a number system called the hyperreal numbers, which include infinitesimally small numbers as well as infinitely large ones. Essentially, this represents a return to the way Newton and Leibniz originally conceptualized the calculus, but with more rigor.
I don't know about other people, but when I learned calculus, I got very uneasy when we got to the Leibniz notation. My teacher said that dy/dx wasn't really one number divided by another, but rather an abbreviation for the limit of the quantity y/x. That wasn't so bad, but what really made me queasy was when he then suggested that you could usually get the right answer by treating these dx and dy thingies as if they were numbers. The scary part was that word "usually." What was legal and what wasn't? How many sizes of infinitesimals were there? Was it legal to say that 1/dx was infinite? What operations would lead to paradoxes? What about proofs that used infinite numbers to show that 1=2? The wonderful thing about this book is that you end up knowing exactly what you can and can't do with infinities and infinitesimals, and you get to use the Leibniz notation in all its intuitively appealing glory. For instance, the chain rule really can be proved simply by writing (dz/dy)(dy/dx)=dz/dx, simply canceling the dy's.
It would be interesting to see how students reacted to this book when learning calculus from scratch. I suspect that they'd have an easier time with many of the concepts like implicit differentiation, which seems so awkward in the traditional approach, but they might be scared a little by the initial development of the hyperreal number system. The book develops the hypperreal system axiomatically, which left me yearning for more of a constructive method. Then again, we develop the rational and real numbers axiomatically in high school, so maybe it's not such a big issue. My initial unease was cleared up by a few crucial examples:
- If H and K are infinite, then H-K may be infinite or finite -- it depends on which infinite numbers H and K are.
- If H is infinite, then (2H+1)/(H+1) isn't equal to 2, but it differs infinitesimally from 2.
- (H+1)1/2-(H-1)1/2 is infinitesimal.
I confess, however, to a little residual indigestion at the way the author develops the integral. He introduces finite Reimann sums first, and gives several numerical examples. But next, instead of taking the limit of sums with more and more terms, he takes the finite sum with n terms, and replaces n with an infinite integer. Instant vertigo!
This is a wonderful, original textbook, and I hope it remains free on the web forever -- it's not copylefted, so unfortunately it may disappear if the author stops maintaining his web site.
The Calculus Bible author G.S. Gill pages 370 URL http://www.math.byu.edu/Math/CalculusBible/ rating 3/10 summary Incomplete, and badly written.
I'm reviewing this book in February of 2004. It's clearly not a finished product, and I'm not sure whether or not the author is still actively working on it. The book is available from the Brigham Young University math department's server, but the author isn't on the department's list of faculty, which makes me think he may have moved on to another job and abandoned the book. It's provided as a PDF file. There is no copyright page and no licensing agreement, so it's hard to know the book's real legal status.
The path through the topics is pretty standard for an introductory calculus course: a review of functions and trigonometry, followed by limits, differentiation, and integration. There is a good selection of problems, although to my taste as a physicist far too few are applied to anything useful. There is a table of contents, but no index. There are no illustrations; sprinkled throughout the text are little placeholders for graphs that just say "graph."
Although the problems I've referred to so far are ones that could be fixed if the author continued to work on the book, I feel that there are some more fundamental problems with this text that will not go away unless it is extensively rewritten. The style is extremely dry, and moreover the author has a habit of introducing concepts without any explanation or preparation. A symptom of this is that the student is expected to grind through the first hundred pages without any clear statement about what calculus is, what it's good for, or even whether the initial chapters are calculus (they're not). Equal prominence is given to topics that I would consider vital (the fundamental theorem of calculus) and others that I would label as trivial (tabulations of facts) or esoteric (the Dedekind cut property).
The Leibniz notation, dy/dx, is given with only this explanation "To emphasize the fact that the derivatives are taken with respect to the independent variable x, we use the following notation, as is customary..." Huh? So are these dx and dy things numbers? Is dy/dx the quotient of them?
Even if the missing graphs were included, the approach would still be relentlessly symbolic, rather than visual. For instance, integration by parts is introduced without ever giving its geometric interpretation.
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Yeah... it's an f'en review of five calc books. The author should be committed and never allowed to enter society again.
Casual Games/Downloads
It was about porn and you know it. Then again, perhaps that IS democratizing publishing. Never mind.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
fell asleep after the third paragraph....pretty much what I did in calc and analytical statistics classes in college.
Wishing I was a millionaire since 1969.
A calculus textbook that costs $100 to buy doesn't mean it's worth a dime. My college used one of the more popular textbooks last year, and it was one of the worst textbooks I've ever encountered.
Ben Crowell, you've reviewed 5 calculus textbooks. Can you help me with my homework?
I find that in my present line of work, statistics references would be more helpful.
Does any such beast exist?
This is the greatest act sacrifice by a reviewer since that Washington Post guy compared and contrasted the 5 latest colonoscopy devices.
- Lots of clear, thorough examples
- Minimize use of crazy symbols high school kids have never seen before. Or at least have a reference where you can look up what they mean.
That's all.
The Wikipedia group has started a wiki textbook site, though the ones I've looked at are not very far along yet.
However, if you've got expertise you'd like to contribute to the public, that might be an easy place for you to do it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
At least some people in the educational system have finally realized that open source is the future. If all educators were like this the classes would be much better. I would love to have a class based on a virtual textbook. Even more, I would love to see some school computers running Linux instead of Windoze. Not only would it save the school system money, but in all reality, it would make the teaching better. There would be no more "lost" papers because windows decided it didn't like you 20 page midterm and decided you needed to fail economics. Not only that, but it could finally introduce the masses to Linux, which everyone can agree would be a good thing.
Sean Mauch has a free online book covering several areas of applied mathematics. It's not complete, but I've found it useful. The page for the book is here.
www.lightandmatter.com has some free introductory physics texts that are pretty interesting.
"Free as in beer"
Where do you live? I want to move there!
Free beer and calculus books leads to a dangerous combination:
Drinking and Deriving.
First-Year Calculus Notes
Difference Equations to Differential Equations: An Introduction to Calculus
Lectures on Calculus
Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals
The Calculus Bible
I can't picture Homer saying "Mmmmmmm... free math. *drool*
Jeezus, just when the nightmares and waking up screaming due to my high school calculus humiliation had finally stopped, Slashdot goes and stirs the pain pot. Hey, Slashdot! Here's a good next article fo you! "The true love of Scooby's life married another man!" Post that one and give the knife another twist, why don't ya?
Damn calculus and trains travelling north from Boston at 35 miles an hour... Damn you, oh mysterious, insane calculus!
...for many professors, writing textbooks provides a serious boost to their salary. I had several courses in which the professor not only wrote the text, but made serious revisions every year in order to keep his revenue stream up. So not only could you not shop around to find a better price on a new text nor buy a used copy to keep your costs down, the resale value at the end of the semester was zip.
The college bookstore near me used to give out free bookmarks for every book they sold.
They later stopped the trend because students complained about how on average you read 10 pages out of every book you purchased for each class.
The bookstore figured if people are just buying the books cause the professor said so... and the students never intend on really reading it. They mind as well maximize profit by a few cents.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/30/204622 6&mode=thread
This thread was about on the ridiculous pricing of college textbooks posted some time back, which can be supplementary to a book review like this
What about calculus from a real analysis approach? That's the best way to get a solid grasp on how it all works (imho).
and high school textbooks.
But then again you can't find anyone riding on a yacht or playing polo in the pages of an American textbook either. The texts also can't say someone has a boyish figure, or is a busboy, or is blind, or suffers a birth defect, or is a biddy, or the best man for the job, a babe, a bookworm, or even a barbarian.
All these words are banned from U.S. textbooks on the grounds that they either elitist (polo, yacht) sexist (babe, boyish figure), offensive (blind, bookworm) ageist (biddy) or just too strong (hell which is replaced with darn or heck). God is also a banned word in the textbooks because he or she is too religious.
To get the full 500-word list of what is banned and why, consult "The Language Police," a new book by New York University professor of education Dianne Ravitch, a former education official in President George H.W. Bush's administration and a consultant to the Clinton administration.
She says she stumbled on her discovery of what's allowed and not allowed by accident because publishers insist that they do not impose censorship on their history and English textbook authors but merely apply rules of sensitivity -- which have expanded mightily since first introduced in the 1970s to weed out gender and racial bias.
Who is the reviewer and what is his math background? what made it possible for him to draw these conclusions for each book? Just curious. The conclusions I can draw from his reviews would vary depending on if I were receiving the insight of a university math professor, a grad student, a practicing engineer, a regular student, and so on...
f(x)=x
It's about the fact that every single year, Wheelock comes out with a new and improved Latin textbook, making the old ones obsolete, so that I couldn't sell mine back to the school store and recoup a small portion of my investment.
Now, when was the last time Latin grammar changed? About 1900 years ago? They could use Latin grammar texts from 50 years ago, and they'd be as good today as they were then. It seems to me that professors are complicit in this little scam.
The same goes for calculus. My calculus text was obsolete by the time I finished the course. Did calculus change? Did they put in some brand new groundbreaking stuff about measuring curves? No, they just wanted to make sure I couldn't sell back my book for others to buy more cheaply than the "new" one.
At the University of Texas, the cost of my books made up at least 30% of my total tuition costs. How insane is that? It's a racket, plain and simple.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
I would have killed for a slashdot story like this 3 or 4 years ago when I was making my calc requirements. One of the best things about using the web for study is the diversity of material out there. You aren't just limited to the dead tree on your desk to help you understand the material.
BTW, Anyone studying math who hasn't been turned on to http://mathworld.wolfram.com should definitely check it out.
I failed Calc twice in college, and gave up on it. I love Math, mostly because I know what I can use it for (Geometry, Algebra, Trig, etc).
I could never figure out why Calculus would ever be of any use to me. Do any fellow Slashdotters have any examples of when Calculus came in handy in a real-life situation? (Rocket Scientists and Astrophysicists need not reply)
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
If you're taking introductionary electric circuit classes, or classes with advanced semiconductor stuff such as transistors (devices here at OSU), a really good EE reference/textbook is "Lessons in Electric Circuits"
The original is at ibiblio.org though.
Sweet. File-Print-Canon Copier
At 80ppm, it'll be done printing at the same time I can go down to the supply closet and get some 3 ring binders.
On a more serious note, you can get a high school kid to sell you his math books (or history, science, english) for some beer or pot.
My undergraduate universtiy Computer Science department had a small lobby with tables and chairs. Professors used to put their old books on the tables for students to take and keep if they found the book useful.
One day I was browsing the free books when I saw a box of brand new calculus books. It seemed odd, but I thought, "Well these books must be free". It was a nice calc book so I took one.
As I was walking out the building it occured to me that maybe sombody just put the box down for a minute to use the restroom or something. I better return the book. By the time I got back to the lobby the box was gone.
I still have the book.
I don't need no stinkin' sig!
The assignment problems can't be solved with the given examples unless you're intelligent enough to extend your knowledge to the point where you can come up with a solution.
What ended up happening was we usually just copied off this one smart guy who did all the extending.
I guess T.A's are supposed to help you close the gap, but I would honestly have a few more difficult examples than a bunch of gimme exercises, which are always the ones the prof chooses to teach during lecture since they are the easiest and cause the least amount of confusion for the class.
Publishing already is democratic, I think what the author was railing against was capitalism, which is another matter entirely. Granted, publishing companies have taken liberties with their content and their pricing structure. But what a good publisher brings to content delivery is filtering of garbage (which is what most of these free books are), quality editing, and a vehicle to reach a wide audience. Publishing books is expensive, the average profit margin for a text books is about %35, a lot less than the margin for jeans, sneakers or routers. If publishers learn to apply their knowlege to web delivery, which few have yet to do, then we may see quality content delivered on-line for a good price.
But he has links to some free math books at his home page including a link to a calculus book in progress. He also had the CRC Encyclopedia of Mathematics there back when Mathworld was offline.
Quote from the first book review "... the source code of the book isn't available (it appears to have been done in LaTeX), which I think makes it legally impossible under the GPL to redistribute the book..."
Is this concept true? If the text is out there you could just as easily reenter it into another mark up language of your choice. It all human readable.
Removing the cost for treeware is poor courseware design, as it introduces the danger of making poor choices without warning of the potential ramifications.
Of course, there is that significant portion of humanity which clicks yes, and then spends countless hours sorting out the damage from higgledy-piggledy courseware installation. The poster certainly falls into this category...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
my Calculus teacher took a strange approach -- he introduced limits as "how does this function look like when we look at it from a very long distance?" or "how does this function look like when we look at it from a very short distance?", and then he developed these similitudes on and on. this way I was able to understand curvilineous integrals and a lot of other strange topics (here the exam is called calculus 2) in something like five minutes... I still haven't found a book taking this approach, but I found this "visual" manner of introducing such a fundamental topic to be quite interesting. HTH.
FHSST
Also, the source code of the book isn't available (it appears to have been done in LaTeX), which I think makes it legally impossible under the GPL to redistribute the book
;)
THis is totally a side issue, but the source thing really interests me. i don't know a lot about what format actual source code comes in, but a lot of the software I download has its souce basically in a textfile...so here's my question: is having to format the book (for presentation, headings, etc.) any different than having to put source code through a compiler, and possibly having to port? Is the source in this case really unavailable,, since the text of the document is right there to be had?
Just curious...
The Internet is like the library of Alexandria - always growing with new and useful information, being copied, spread, developed. The story tells us that when ships were at the Alexandria harbour, the authorities searched through the ships for books - which they copied and then returned to their owners. ("Filesharing", if you will :-) ) It was the most important centre of learning and knowledge at the time. Hypatia would publish her work for free on the internet, had she lived today.
Thanks for an interesting review! The economics of college textbooks are indeed a bit nuts, and the development of free (and especially libre) courseware is exciting. I gotta say though, if there's any course for which I think it's worth plunking down cash for a nice, well-bound, colour-printed book, it'd have to be first-year calculus. In particular I'm thinking of Stewart.
Another comment - most of these books seem to cover single-variable only - if you're going to need it eventually (as i did, being a physicist), i really think it's helpful to have vector analysis/differentiation/integration covered in the same book in a unified presentation. Again I'm thinking Stewart here.
I have read a dead-tree "calculus in order of historcal development" book before and it was a bit sticky but it was intended for more advanced maths or history-of-maths students... maybe that was the intended audience of the Shchepin book?
...uhhh...wait...forget it.
CBV
free ipod and free gmail!
Thanks. I'll be here all week, folks.
um, you can't mod and post in the same discussion, i don't think.
I am a statistician of sorts (my training isn't in statistics per se, but that's what I do research on), and I'm sorry to say that I'm not aware of any good online statistics references.
There are some sites that come close.
Mathworld, for example, has some excellent reference material on statistics, but beyond some very basic or introductory material, it tends to become sparse quickly. It's typical of much of what's out there: lots of material on mathematics, but not statistics in particular. I also have ethical objections to Wolfram, and so feel uncomfortable supporting any site hosted by his company.
PlanetMath: is a good alternative to Mathworld, filling in some material that Mathworld lacks. It has the benefit of being open. However, PlanetMath suffers from the problem of being extremely disorganized. Many of the entries seem incomplete or lacking in depth. Finally, like Mathworld, it doesn't treat statistics as much as other branches of math.
HyperStat is a good online resource for introductory statistics. I've actually referred to it a couple of times in my research when I can't remember exactly what some formula is, and don't trust my memory of it. It covers introductory material in depth, but doesn't go into fundamentals or intermediate or advanced material. It's also sort of commercial, disorganized, and poorly designed.
Statsoft Electronic Textbook covers more advanced material, but doesn't seem to provide much explanation or background. It's really more a guide to doing analyses in STATISTICA than anything else.
Finally, I've noticed the Statistics Glossary more and more, but it really is a glossary more than an explanatory reference. It also doesn't get further than very introductory topics.
In short, there is a huge niche for a comprehensive, open, in depth statistics resource ala Mathworld or PlanetMath. Perhaps PlanetMath will become more organized and complete. I've thought about contributing to PlanetMath, but I don't feel completely comfortable with it.
The one thing I like about the Calculus book I bought in my first year of university was that it was useful for at least three or four courses, and it has served as a good reference well into my graduate studies. I payed about 125 (cdn$) for it, and it's definitely been worth it.
The one thing I don't get about courses teaching basic calculus is that the material hasn't really changed much in some 10's to 100's of years, meaning in theory, that any solid calculus book (perhaps by judging reviews on Amazon or whatever), should cover everything that you would need to know for a differential or integral calculus course. The problem is, the teacher sets the book, and that's what everyone buys...simply because that's the way people are.
While not free, this little book does a great job of explaining the basics of calculus, what it's used for and how to visualize it.
Highly Recommended!
Amazon Listing
I have talked to a number of authors who applied the GPL to their products thinking that it simply made the binaries "free as in beer" and were shocked that I would ask for their source code.
It appears the authors' intents were to make these texts open and freely available, but the software-oriented GPL doesn't seem to be the appropriate license for what they are trying to do.
There are even some situations in software, such as image-based systems like Smalltalk (Squeak as an example), where the GPL's orientation around classical library linkage ends up inadvertently reducing the "free as in speech"-ness.
When I was in college, our physics books were a "collaborative" book developed by Thomas Moore and "published" by McGraw-Hill. I dug one of the volumes out- it's bound with that cheesy plastic springy binder, because my college had to print it. So it's practically falling apart- whereas the textbooks from my father's classes are still looking good on his shelf in his office.
Doing your homework was fun- absolutely every problem set we did had at LEAST one mistake, to the point that our physics teacher was probably the most annoyed and frustrated of all of us as we went over our homework the next day. Every problem had to be worked out by the class together and double-checked, because the teacher's edition was wrong too! Great except when you're behind, everyone understood the problem, and you need to catch up on the curriculum schedule.
Graphs has wrong units, labels, variable names, or simply didn't exist but had problems referencing them. Equations were flat-out wrong or had typos. Page numbers and section numbers didn't match(Ie "see section 3-2 for more information on..."). Diagrams looked like they were drawn by a kid(you know, things like sailboats with triangle sails and trapezoid hulls? Flowers with smiley faces? Etc.)
The kicker? We were the second year to use the book, and the first year's class had turned in a HUGE list of corrections to Moore. The second edition sprouted even more errors, and some of the errors from the first year were never corrected. We weren't the only ones using it, either; plenty of other schools turned in corrections as well. I feel sorry for the kids at Pomona, must have been embarrassing to know other schools were using it.
Please help metamoderate.
"The economics of college textbooks is goofy, because the person who picks the book isn't the person who has to pay for it." Ussually the person picking the book is the person who wrote the damn book.
I can't believe it, the Kiesler book on Infinitesimal Calculus is the text I learned from way back when I was a freshman in 1976. And it's the reason I can't do calculus AT ALL.
I was in the Honors Math program, and the program director, in a moment of insanity, decided to use Kiesler's new book with the Infinitesimals approach. But there was only one problem, the book wasn't actually IN PRINT yet. Every monday, we received a new chapter of the book's galley proofs, followed by a long session of corrections. The teacher would write the errata on the blackboard and we wrote them in our texts. This took almost the entire session. We met 3 times a week, so the errata effectively nuked 1/3 of our classroom time.
Of course, this isn't likely to be a problem in the revised 2nd edition. However, the problem with this text is that it uses a completely nonstandard approach to calculus. The Infinitesimals approach is weak on the standard methods you really study calculus FOR, like differential equations. My roommate took the regular calc course and I studied with him, learning a few standard differentiation methods. I used a few of those techniques in the midterm test, they were marked wrong (even though they were the correct answers) and got called into the teacher's office. He said, "you didn't learn that in MY COURSE, did you?" We had to do everything the hard way, with infinitesimals, which was supposed to make you a better mathematician. It didn't.
As an amusing side note, I had a scheduling conflict with another final and had to take a makeup test, I was assigned a room to take the test all by myself, the teacher said he'd come back at the end to collect the test and if I left the room, he'd assumed I cheated and he'd give me an F. During the test, the building caught on fire on an upper floor and smoke started to drift in through the ducts. A campus security cop came in the room and told me to leave. I said I wouldn't, I only had 10 more minutes left on the test and I could finish before the fire spread. The cop grabbed me and shoved me out the door. The teacher gave me an F on the final for leaving the room. I got a D+ for the course, a passing grade, and that was good enough for me.
Anyway, I suppose the main problem was that the teachers hadn't figured out how to teach Infinitesimal Calculus yet, and I suspect they still haven't. Grappling with the abstraction of hyperreal numbers is extremely impractical in a world where everyone else uses an entirely different methodology. Avoid this text if you don't want your math skills permanently damaged. I think I'll pick up one of these other freebie calc texts and learn it over from scratch.
I feel strongly about the universal access of inforamation (at least information of educational value). There will come a time when people in poor countries will have easy access to computers just as they have access to TV now. However, there may not be enough educational information available.
Open source books (where some others can create derived works too) will make the future good for all (in a statistical sense -- there will be a few that benefit from withholding information).
The main concerns are legal threats (e.g. someone like SCO saying, "All partial derivatives are derivative work of SCO"), public perception.
The perception that the free material is somehow inferior can be propagated (e.g. in societies that pride on conspicuous consumption, the people that influence decisions can make a statement against free books), and general bitterness when some contributors don't think they are given credit.
I envison a big movement of free educational books, where the educators/scientists provide information, techies volunteer effort to find effective means of publishing/presentation, and end users do QA and feedback.
A physicist will come up with a nice theory, a document designer will design a fancy document, a web kiddie will create fancy animations explaining the concept, and all will fit into a standard form of information exchange (provided a large set of people overcome egos, preconceptions and prejudices).
S
The economics of college textbooks is goofy, ...
...
Holy Jebus! Repeat after me, "Subject and verbs must agree.".
The economics of college textbooks are goofy,
The form of the verb "to be" must agree with the subject "the economics".
Now, let me click this anonymous checkbox in case I made any mistakes.
Especially when you consider that the source can have comments in it which would not appear in the output.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
His style tends to be slightly curt, but as stated, this fits with his course. His material provides very good overviews, and strives to explain everything in 'layman's terms,' something that almost every one of his students have problems with at first. As an example, he wants factorial explained when you use it the first time (he's not so mundane to make you do this every time on every assignment, thankfully.) This means you [theoretically] could read the book start to finish without too much previous knowledge, and understand most of it.
Definitely worth a look, and if you're currently at, or going to attend, the University of Minnesota, I highly recommend you look up Garrett's courses and consider taking them.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
The worst about modern textbooks is that they get updated damn too often (intentionally of course). Almost every year a new edition is released, which renders all previous editions almost unusable in a class. Mostly, they change the layout of the book and juggle around excercises, so thet they will be hard to locate in older editions. And students are forced to buy new and very expensive books, while perfectly good old books get thrown away.
--The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese
You're idealistic.
This is a nice development. I still don't understand why all these new books, are there really that many new developments in college level math to justify all the new calc books we are forced to buy and spend $100+? I am sure in the past 50 or so years there were a number of good books, so why not stick to those. The pulishers, of course, will want to rearange the homework problem and perhaps add a web link and "there you go", a new $100 book. I would hope at least the professors would be on the students' side and understand what it's like. If they are concerned about using an old book that everyone can find solutions for, they can (what a concept!) develop the problems themselves. In the end it seems, the publishers won't be able to keep up with people who set up textbooks trading websites. They would have to publish new versions every quarter or so. At my Univ. there is at least one guy who set up a textbook trading site to bypass the ridiculous ripoff by college bookstore and publishers. That's another thing that web is good for (besides porn of course).
Anyone know of any good linear algebra books online? I'd like something that actually tells you WHY you'd want to do certain things. I watched some MIT courses online awhile ago, and they were good.
As someone who _teaches_ calculus frequently, and chooses
textbooks, I think the prices are absurdly high.
However, having said that, I'll choose the better book over
the one that is half the price in a heartbeat. The one we use
costs about $140 US. I think it _ought_ to cost $40 or $50.
But given the amount the student invests in time (and in money
in the form of tuition), the difference of $90 seems too small
to merit using an inferior book.
The other thing that this review makes clear is that writing a
good calculus textbook is actually hard, even if you know
calculus well. (Hell, even writing a _bad_ calculus textbook
seems to be hard.)
It is also true that the costs of publishing these books is high,
but it is often higher than it needs to be. Including too many
topics, huge margins on every page, (at least) three colors on
every page, etc. must drive up the printing costs considerably
and don't have good pedagogic justifications.
I have a professor who tried very hard to get a good book for one of his courses and worked very closely with the publisher. He ended up getting a 20% discount on a book that was required by all seniors in our ECE department (for senior design).
However, guess where that 20% went? Our bookstore made a killing with the price mark up. The savings were passed on to the bookstore, not the students. How typical.
Textbooks are required by every public school, most private schools, and many home schools, and public universities in America. American public educational institutions spend several billion of tax dollars per year for textbooks. Added to this cost is the fact that K-12 textbooks have risen at three times the rate of inflation since 1992. In California alone, the annual cost for K-12 textbooks is more than $400M per year.
r oject
The textbook industry began its climb to prominence in the 1950's and 60's's, as Baby Boomers entered private and public educational institutions in unpecedented numbers. There was a real need for mass produced educational materials, and commercial textbook publishers filled the demand.
As enrollment in educational institutions continued to increase, commercial educational publishers gradually became default the suppliers of text-based educational materials.
Realizing that they had a near monopoly on the educational publishing market, commercial publishers began to raise prices and force "new editions" of classic textbooks into the market to compell new purchases, and defeat the used textbook market. Also, textbook prices began to rise precipitously; it's not unusual for a high school textbook to approach $100, or more.
Continued dependence on commercial publishers for basic textbooks has led to a "fox is living in the henhouse" situation. As a result, massive diseconomies and inefficiencies have been introduced to the academic textbook market.
We now live in a time where most consumers can walk into their neighborhood bookstore and purchase a 10th-grade level book on Euclidean Geometry for $10-15. Yet, the same curriculum material, embellished for a 10th-grade school district, can cast upwards of $100, often in addition to the purchase of required ancillary materials (teacher's guides, study guides, lab tapes, etc.).
Until recently, short of requiring every teacher (or school district) to write its own textbooks, nothing could be done about this costly situation.
With the advent of new Internet technology, and new intellectual property licensing innovations, it is now possible to create free high-quality, distributed banks of educational content. This content can published and distributed for far less than similar materials provided by commercial publishers.
Here is a listing of some well-known open source educational projects
Some new current open source content projects are as follows:
California Open Source Textbook Project (conducting pilot projects)
http://www.opensourcetext.org
Wikipedia World History Project (a beginning pilot)
http://wikibooks.org/wiki/World_History_P
MIT's OpenCourseWare project (a university =based open curriculum project)
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
There is a burgeoning movement to create "open source" educational content banks, from which insitutional (even individual) users can select - and publish - content about virtually *any* educational topic. These content resevoirs will be constructed to meet the most demanding curriculum frameworks, at all levels of curriculum instruction.
The open educational content movement makes sense because the bulk of formal educational content - i.e. the content that is delivered to student by educational institutions - doesn't change very much from year to year. For instance, there has been almost no change in the Calculus, or Euclidean Geometry for hundreds of years. Some basic curriculum areas do change, although slowly (with a very few exceptions). Thus, it's possible to imagine a scenario where free, open source access to educational content - based on sound curriculum frameworks put forward by our best public and private institutions - would benefit educational institutions, students, and taxpayers. More, bettwr quality, and less costly educational content will result.
Many foreign governments and international agencies are on the constant lookout for high quality inexpensive acces to high quality educational content in English, and other languages; they will also benefit from the reduced cost, greater quality, and wider availablility of open source educational content.
I just bought the rights to calculus from Novell a couple of years ago. I'm going to look through these books to see if any of my intellectual property is there.
Do you have ESP?
What the hell would that accomplish? Once you post to a story, you can't moderate it, that includes your already made moderations - they are void, and you don't regain mod points either. Posting as AC works, though.
I agree with your general points; new editions are indeed a racket and I hope that sooner or later wikibooks and the like go mainstream. However, I have a fond place in my heart for Wheelock's Latin (I'm in my second semester of Latin right now) and wanted to clear up a few things:
1. First of all, Wheelock is dead and has been for a considerable period of time. So I guess you can blame the publisher and Richard LeFleur, whom it hired to do the most recent revision.
2. Wheelock's Latin was first published in 1956, and is now in its sixth edition. So, that's 6 editions in 48 years, or an average of eight years per edition. Granted, I don't know what the distribution of the editions is year-wise, but still that seems pretty reasonable.
3. True, Latin and Calculus aren't changing, but teaching styles are. I don't care for all of the new additions to Wheelock 6, but the "Practice and Review" sentences are very helpful. So long as new revisions are improvements and not merely changes, I don't mind them.
After the war, the theory people took over again, of course.
I guess it just shows how much of a geek I am. When the title to this review showed up in my aggregator my first thought was, "Sweet! Free calculus books!"
/.
I graduated in 2000. I have not required a calculus book in years, I simply feel stupid because I know how much knowledge I've lost. Therefore, textbooks excite me. When I go into used bookstores, I always check the old textbooks.
Yet what is true geekdom is the fact that I would freely admit this to anyone, not just on
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
What, you have not heard about the recent groundbreaking discoveries in calculus?
It is amazing how these textbooks manage to keep up.
Now, I still buy books for my liberal arts classes for a number of reasons, but I haven't bought a single text for a class in my major (IT) in over three years. Quite frankly, for any technical question I could have, there's almost always an answer out there on the intarweb just waiting for me.
;^)
The text choices of my professors always seemed so arbitrary, and the same information appears in countless forums, web pages, and so forth. Instead of reading pages 110-115 in a $90 text, I google for "Microsoft Active Directory" or "Kernal Hacking," and spend $90 on a giant honking steak dinner
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Michael Spivaks' CALCULUS is the finest example of an introductory analysis text I've ever encountered. That hefty volume is partly the reason I eneded up studying math.
mints
I had to take a required business computing class in college (1101 type course) and in it, the author has his real resume (except the address I would guess) as an example. The sad fact is, I'm more qualified to write that book than he was. He basically had a bunch of MS Office certs and could program in Visual Basic...
Not suprisingly the book was terrible.
Furthermore, the book was the equivalent of telling someone how to eat a bowl of cereal. Confusing to those not farmiliar with computers, and laughable to those who are.
Here is my favorite calculus mnemonic...
d[(hi)/(ho)] = [(ho)d(hi) - (hi)d(ho)]/[(ho)(ho)]
yea, I know, corny....buy you'll never forget it.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
When I was in college, you can easily get lost in the symbols because run-of-the-mill teachers have often lost their passion for math. Math is the language of God (oooppsss... bracing for flamebursts) and it pervades everything in the universe.
Oftentimes, Math is taught as something for the geeks/propellerheads and classical Humanities training is almost totally divorced from it.
I think that is a mistake.
We should really use Math, as just that, a language - and try to use it to express concepts taught in the Humanities to better grasps some seemingly abstract concepts that words (which were "invented" by man) cannot express.
Think about it - how many of us took Spanish and French lessons in middle school and summarily forgot it right after the course? Why is that, because we were only tutored in the syntax of those languages and we didn't apply it to real life in our daily conversations. The same is true for Math.
But unlike other "human" languages, Math predates us - we only "discover" it as we push the edge of our comprehension of the world around us.
For myself, I've rehabilitated my Math instruction by using some visualization tools like Mathematica which facilitates comprehension of abstract concepts on an instinctive level.
I think having tools like Mathematica should be a requirement for math instruction.
I mean really, how much calculus has been discovered in the last 200 years? And of that, how much is being taught in college in Calc I, II or III?
Most calculus is hundreds of years old. How can you keep making new introductory texts to it? Kind of like having a series of books on the latest trends in waltzing, if you ask me.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't care how good the free textbooks are, they aren't going to be in widespread use. My university sees textbooks as a fund raising device. They'll sell access to some special version of an online textbook for $80-100 dollars. That way, they get all that money without having to worry about selling actual products. Maybe a few benevolent profs will do the online books, but they'll get in trouble with their dept chairs for it.
"Calculus Made Easy" is, unless my memory is wrong, in the public domain--it was printed in the very early part of this century, before IP became so draconian, and Silvanus P. Thompson is long-dead.
So if you want, you should be able to find Silvanus P. Thompson's original "Calculus Made Easy" in the public domain--Gutenberg might have it.
The versions which are still under copyright are the annotated versions, e.g., the one edited by Martin Gardner (of Scientific American's "Mathematical Games" column).
I have a copy of the Gardner edition of "Calculus Made Easy" and I'll heartily attest to its worthiness. After taking three semesters of calculus, the subject was still incomprehensible to me: I could solve calculus problems, but I didn't understand why calculus worked. After reading "Calculus Made Easy", I understood.
I took the two course crypto sequence from professor Garrett, author of the first reviewed book, and I can say without question he's a great math educator. We used "re-release" copies of his crypto text, which unfortunately he was unable to make freely available. Hopefully, it'll get opened in the future and picked up by other professors as it's a wonderful teaching text on an underrepresented subject.
In high and middle school we used all the Saxon books from Algebra up to Physics and Calculus. I've seen several calculus books as I continued on to Electrical Engineering in college and concluded that the Saxon Calculus book was MILES better than any other. They're not organized into topics, but lessons. About 110-120 of them. A the end of each lesson is about four problems on the new material and then 26 or so on the previous lessons. You only get about 3-4 pages of new material before having to do problems on it so it forces you to learn at a regular rate.
Or this was my experience in high school anyway. In college it was study these 3 chapters and then a test next month where these 3 chapters consisted of 110 pages all about all types of derivatives.
Re: must create Python program to figure out Pi. I've created a simple Excel spreadsheet. It took about 5 minutes. Here it is:
1 1 1 1 1 0.785394347 3.141577386
2 3 0.333333333 -1 -0.333333333
3 5 0.2 1 0.2
4 7 0.142857143 -1 -0.142857143
5 9 0.111111111 1 0.111111111
6 11 0.090909091 -1 -0.090909091
7 13 0.076923077 1 0.076923077
8 15 0.066666667 -1 -0.066666667
9 17 0.058823529 1 0.058823529
10 19 0.052631579 -1 -0.052631579
11 21 0.047619048 1 0.047619048
12 23 0.043478261 -1 -0.043478261
13 25 0.04 1 0.04
14 27 0.037037037 -1 -0.037037037
15 29 0.034482759 1 0.034482759
The result was 3.141577 for 65500 iterations (max rownums in Excel).
Pretty close, but yeah, it would have taken a while to figure this one out.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written. This deep, dark forest of mathematical symbols, interspersed with ungrammatical English
I thought it looked quite similar to other famous "analysis Bibles" like Rudin etc. Personally I can't stand the touchy-feely coloring book calculus tomes that keep surfacing.
Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course?
No. It reads to me like an analysis textbook written for future math majors. A decent one at that.
The presence of end-of-chapter homework problems would seem to imply that it was.
Huh? Almost all textbooks have problems. Even ones aimed at graduate students. That's how you're supposed to learn. By doing.
Most of the problems begin with the words "Prove that...," and neither the text nor the problems give any of the standard applications to biology, economics, physics, etc.
Blah. It's a math book. The students are supposed to learn to prove things that might appear abstract and useless. Not everybody learns math just to become a fizzicist.
I know at Rice many of our EE classes are taught using online texts which are all part of the Connexions Project where authors contribute "modules" of information (using xml under a creative commons license) and educators can form complete texts from these modules (see more on the philosophy page).
Got some news for you, College books were very expensive 20 years ago, too. Many weren't resellable for a variety of reasons, new editions, omg, they changed books for the next semester, whatever. My general cost at the time for college books was a minimum of $50 per class, and that was for used books as well (ok - Racquetball PE book was only $11;). My most expensive useless book was a continuum mechanics book in grad school that was a whole 100 pages, cost me $89, and we sort of used it over a 4 week period.
Skimming over this particular story's comments and the linked story of overpriced books thread, I only came across one session that in today's $s showed a single class being expensive - a $300 set of books for a single class. Halve that at least for inflation effects over 20 years, and it's $150 max, in 1984 $s. Note the above statement about 1 $89 book used for less than 4 weeks in a 15 week course, and realize books are actually cheaper today, on average, than 20 years ago.
Tuition, however, is another story. In 1983, I paid $3/semester hour.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Drinking and Deriving.
"Hey baby, let me find the tangent to your curves."
The coolest voice ever.
If you're looking for more free online maths / physics texts, there are a great many avaliable.
Some CS people might be interested in the book on Information theory by Dave Mackay (author of Dasher). Unlike most people, he seems to have taken a truly "Open-Source" approach to book publishing.
If you are looking for Textbooks, I think its worth giving this site a mention. It's the most comprehensive free mathematical textbook listing on the Internet, and I'd recommend it to anyone. Some people also find the resources offed by 'Got Math?' useful.
I had an Organic Chemistry prof who felt very strongly that the textbook thing was a complete scam. He would 'skip' editions. That is, he would use edition 3 until edition 5 came out. However, he said that you couldn't get too far behind, or you couldn't get books. Point is, it's not entirely the prof's fault. I think this might slowly catch on.
I had (attempted) to post an ask slashdot query about where to find good beginner calculus resourses, then a week later this pops up, so very helpful in that regard.
What I find really ironic though, is that I decided to start downloading the books, fully expecting the sites to be slashdotted. However, they are running just fine.
I have to wonder as to the quality of "nerds" we have here if lots of us are *NOT* downloading books on calculus.
Come on, you in the back! You are a jock! You don't know what an integral is do you? Get outta here!
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
most teachers are conservative
Is he fucking joking? University hiring committees are run by flaming leftists whose idea of "intellectual diversity" is having Marxists, Leninists, and Trotskyists. Even the "token conservative" on campus is generally well to the left of Ralph Nader.
"Conservative", my ass.
I have to disagree with a point in the review of this one. The reviewer claims it doesn't do any "real calculus" until p. 136 or so. This is just not true - the first chapter is about sequences and series, which is "real calculus." Most calculus courses leave that until the second semester, focusing on functions on the Reals first (which this book delays). However, starting with sequences is a more natural progression from a foundational point of view, and is what is normally done in more advanced classes on the theory of calculus taken by mathematicians (and the occasional physicist and engineer).
Starting with sequences is probably a better way to understand what is actually going on, while the standard route will get you doing calculations for your physics class sooner.
Since you mentioned it, I recalled an interview I'd heard, and still have a link for. Although I can't post the .wax file, here's the interview program's page, with a link to the interview.
y &t odayDate=04/29/2003
http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?display=da
Mainly, she talks about some of the words, why they're banned, and about how this is possible. While I'm sure there's much more detail in the book, I've never read the book, so can't give a comparison one way or another. Either way, this may give some people a better idea of what you're talking about, since I doubt they'll all go and buy books recommended by an AC.
I remember thinking at the time that it would be a neat idea to set up a website where professors and teachers could post ('publish'), and others could access the materials, redistribute, etc. However, I was (and still am) unsure of the legal implications of this.
Step 1: Publish Book
Step 2: Release Updated book with enough minor revisions over previsions edition(s) to make them obsolete (ie changing order of practice/homework questions)
Step 3: Profit
I had this misfortune of taking Calc I three times in college, amazingly, we used a different book each time and I got very familiar with the above steps. Each time I thought I was smart in keeping the book thinking "Sure enough, next time we'll use the same one". Nope.
What really got me was that the third time through, we used the second edition of the book used in my first time through. Only substantial difference between them other then the covers, was the questions, thus preventing me from being able to use my old book when the teacher would say "Do problems 1-20 from chapter 4"
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The Calculus book at Wikibooks is another Free (as in freedom) calculus book. It's well-written, if incomplete.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
I couldn't believe reading someone else in this Universe was questioning the poor declaration and teaching of Leibniz notation...
The whole concept of blindly accepting formulae and simple memorization to steer one clear of horrible mistakes in interpreting dy/dx is unbelievable!
I've recently dove back into the past of textbooks searching for other ways of learning and teaching the Calculus and found one teacher from Texas A&M mentioning there was a coup of sorts in the mid-70's where elitist Mathematcians gathered together to assault Engineering students.. and thereby cripple their future adversaries.. it's a plot see! plane and simple.
It began in the Ivory towers of Ivy League Universities.. they sent forth their disciples to teach Mathematics 'their way' abstract and pure, orthodox and just...
Mere slackers like Newton and Leibniz would be cast out and thrown down as rogue elements clinging to the profession of 'Engineering' not true scientist and academcians.. unworthy of the mere ruminitions in their ancient dialogues..
Students would be bumfuddled and confused..
So utterly confused they would never question the mystical muses of Math professors ever again.. Ionian civilization would live again! Platonic solids would be erected in every town square.
In all jest however.. traversing the abstract first then the applied runs counter to historical discovery and evidence..
Motivation should be driven by something other than pure and chast devotion to a mystical subject.. students should learn to question and expect an answer for the good money their parents pay for their education.
Ben Crowell, you just made my day. Some of these books look like great choices for refresher calculus. I'm a bit disappointed that I'm not using calculus more often, where many of my classes favor algrebra for many things. I absolutely hated learning from Allyn J. Washington's books, and really wanted some alternatives. I wish I had known about these free texts earlier.
Not only do the professors pick books not having to pay for them, they also, when possible, will select books written by their friends. (this further fucks up the works, because they aren't even selecting a book because they think it's the best.)
And then there's the fact that, for subjects like Math, particularly, someone who knows the material backward and forward is a terrible judge of what is best for learning that subject.
Simmons calculus (big brown 90 dollar textbook) has a lot of interesting sidebars, but the main meat of the textbook jumps all over the place and is at times impossible to follow. 3 wasted semesters with that textbook. If i'd started my college calc classes a semester earlier, I'd have been using the same one I used in high school, Thomas & Finney...2/3 the size, 2/3 the price, and just BETTER.
But some math professors thought interesting bells and whistles were more important than readable instructions.
They did eventually ditch that book. But not before I sold it for 65 dollars. (so it wasn't such a bad deal after all)
The correct spelling is "Riemann", not "Reimann".
Simply for your information.
I know it's not free, but it is so good that you will wonder why Calc was ever so mysterious. I am amazed at how convoluted Calculus textbooks have become. Published originally circa 1900 (I apologize but I don't have the book in front of me and I can't recall the exact date), this very small book treats calculus the way it should. Rather than hitting you over the head with a weighty tome, it just explains calculus.
After reading just a few chapters, I actually calculated by hand the calculus results for a typical calculus problem. I was not using the 'chain rule' or any of those short-cut tools, but just only used basic algebra. This was the first time I'd ever done this in my entire life. I've been through Calc 1 & 2 and Multi-Var Calc, and others (for a Math minor)(hehe, I did Calc 1 twice, got an A both times, and still didn't understand it). I learned all the 'rules' but I never understood why I was doing it until I read Silvanus.
I recommend it highly. Martin Gardiner updated the book for it's recent publication to use current notation. Best of all, it's a small book. If you're at all interested in calc, it's worth your time. I would wager it's worth more than several of the 'cinder block' calc textbooks put together.
Be careful what you wish for...
Where your treasure is there is your heart also...
The biggest single problem is that most of the time in class the professor is talking about stuff that the class doesn't understand. The professor knows that the class doesn't understand it. But the professor wastes the time anyways.
Furthermore we use the stupid limit approach everywhere. Limits were a wonderful advance..in the 1870's when they were first invented. They solved a big problem with infinitesmals, that nobody could justify the existence infinitesmals. But their contribution to your ability to solve useful Calculus problems is nonexistent. Students don't understand them. The time taken to explain them means that many students miss wholesale more important concepts like the tangent line.
For a better foundation to teach Calculus with, I really like Knuth's proposal. To understand why math teaching sucks and will continue to suck, I highly recommend Morris Kline's book Why The Professor Can't Teach. Don't let the title put you off, it wasn't Kline's first choice. The book itself was first recommended to me by a math professor who said, "This is my biography."
Oh, a final note. Having been through the construction of infinitesmals behind nonstandard analysis, you don't want to go there. Really. The original one due to Abraham Robinson requires the axiom of choice. This is not a good introduction.
OK, some final comments on the infinitesmal approach. The simple chain-rule proof outlined does not cover the case where dy/dx is 0. This is suprisingly tricky to do in generality because dy might be 0, getting you back into the problem of multiplying and dividing by 0. Most of the complexity in any real proof of the chainrule will boil down to this situation. (Except the proof with little-o notation.)
And finally, anyone who does not understand infinitesmals cannot see where the notation for higher-order derivatives comes from. If you consider d a linear operator (dy = y(x+dx)-y(x)), where dx is an infinitesmal), then the first derivative is dy/dx. The second derivative is therefore d(dy/dx)/dx. But dividing by dx is a linear operator, so factor that out and you get (d(d(y))/dx)/dx which gives the old d2y/dx2 (with the 2's as exponents).
And yes, you can translate that into numerical estimates. Plus switch to a better d operator (such as y(x+dx/2)-y(x-dx/2)) and your numerical estimates become better. (ie (y(x+dx)-2y(x)+y(x-dx))/dx/dx)
Look no further thjanhere to see why differential equations are quite important.
The following textbook is being used in my honours linear algebra class. The textbook is great, well laid out, and has answers for all exercises. The link is:
http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/
The author once distributed the answers in PDF form but no longer does unless you request it from him. He states that the answers are no longer downloadable but if you download the full postscript package it includes the answers in postscript format. Good Luck!!
You expect us to believe you really took an F on your exam because a cop forced you out the door?
The way I see it, there are only 2 possibilities here:
1) The fabled fire never happened. You took an F because you didn't know the material.
2) The fire did in fact happen, and you didn't care enough to simply present the facts to your Professor or Dean to justify your absense.
I think just about everyone at UT feels your pain now that the Coop has a monopoly on textbook sales.
A few things i did to save money/recoup losses:
1. borrow textbooks from the library whenever possible. If the library does not have the book, request that they buy it.
2. use an older edition of the book. and copy by hand/photocopy/scan/take a digital picture of the new problem sets in newer editions. As an electrical engineering major, i could print out like 800-1000 per semester pages at the Engineering Science building without additional charges- I used that quota for this purpose on occasion.
3. sell older books that the coop will not take back on amazon. i managed to sell the worst ever electrical engineering textbook on amazon. i was happy to get any money for that piece of shit.
4. ask your prof if you actually need to buy a book. sometimes the book is on the syllabus, but it is not used much. better just to borrow it for a short time when you need it.
5. there is a TEXbooks service, if you don't know about it- it's a bulletin board website with postings to buy/sell books. do a search on UT's website for it
Somebody needs to start a riot and burn down the Coop. Seriously, despite their "contributions" to campus, they are getting fat. It would be totally awesome if there was a campus wide boycott of the Coop, but that would be extremely difficult to pull off.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
To second this, one of my roommates does all his textbook shopping online. I believe he uses half.com, and he reportedly *makes* money on his textbook transactions by selling them back slightly higher than he bought them for. Not much money, like $14 USD, but still, it beats losing $400 each semester...
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
Anyone seeking more free math textbooks should definitely check out this and this.
For the calculus classes here, there actually is a lot of thought put in to which textbook to use. The problem is, not as much thought is given to student expenses. For example, when a new edition of the calculus book we were using came out, TPTB decided they didn't like the new one. So they got permission to reprint the old one, with extra problems designed for our students (which I refused to assign so students could use the older edition instead of having to buy the reprinted one). However, they made the decision to only use this book for ONE YEAR, and then switch to an entirely different one. I told my students at the beginning of the semester that their book would be worthless on resale and thus they should beg or borrow (though not steal) the old edition from a friend to save the money. I imagine many other instructors didn't bother to explain this.
Screw the free Calculus books... I want the free answers to the Calculus exams!
That's one of the reasons why Newton is a true genius - not only were his instincts about the world substantially correct, but he actually developed the mathematical techniques to deal with the world as he saw it, and he did it the hard way.
My question is - what are people doing waiting until university to learn calculus?
We did it (in the Leibnitz formulation) for O-level (now called GCSE - exams taken at 16 or so), in enough detail to cover most of the current first year university courses.
And that was only twenty-five years ago.
I can't believe that the average teenager has become four years more stupid in the last quarter of a century - if it carries on at this rate, the average graduate in 2054 will know as much as I did for my scholarship exams in 1974, when I was 10.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
First, to be honest, I much prefer the King Isaac version.
"In the beginning, God created X, and X was without function. And God said, "Let there be f(X)!" and there was f(X). And God created Y to hold the f(X) and saw that it was good."
"And the serpent said unto Eve, 'has God told you that you may divide by any number in the garden?' And she replied unto him, 'By any number of the garden we may divide, but the by the zero in the center of the garden we must not divide, lest we die.' Then the serpent said unto her, 'You will not die. God knows that if you divide by the zero, you will become a Math professor and will become like God, or at least think you are.'
"And thus it is written that a Sine shall leave his mother, and a Cosine shall leave their home, and the two of them squared shall be as one."
This is exactly why so many calculus textbooks are so appallingly bad. They almost always ignore the things that confuse students, and they don't take the time to explain things carefully and logically in simple English. They fail to highlight common mistakes in using or understanding the notation and terminology, which is critically important to the learning process.
Below is an example of the kind of writing that calculus text books should be chock filled with, but never are:
All the science and math books from that era were better than what we have today, in that they were easier to understand, got right to the point, and used common sense, interesting examples. I once borrowed a high school science textbook that a friend had, which was published in 1929. I ate it up like candy, and I think I learned more in 4 or 5 hours than I did throughout 4 years of high school. It was fantastic. It covered everthing from Newtonian physics to chemistry to some basic engineering, and to this day, I've never found a more informative introductory textbook. They truly don't make 'em like they used to.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The GNU "Free" Documentation License, despite the name, is not a Free license. See Nathaniel Nerode's "Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL". The GPL, on the other hand, is a Free license. So be glad that the authors chose the GPL, and consider the omission of source a minor issue that is easily corrected. Please do not use this minor issue to advocate changing to a much worse license.
The problem may be that he retired. That's why he's not shown on the faculty list. I took a class from him at BYU about 30 years ago. The description of the book reminds me a lot of the class. It may just be an expansion of his course notes. The dY/dX explaination is one I remember from the class. Of course, it could be a different Dr. Gill, maybe a son. Any recent or current students know?
I just love the intro. calc. book by Courant: Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol. 1. It is clear and precise. The downside is that almost all problems are proofs and there are no solutions. So for self-study you need to complement the material with a solutions book.
I noticed this in college as well. If you are (un)fortunate enough to get a big-name professor instead of a TA for one of your classes, he may have written his own expensive textbook, and will usually require you to buy it for his class. And if he is a big-name professor, he usually has many students every semester, and thus has a built-in audience.
So now that I'm aware of the existence of free textbooks, my next questions, naturally, are: are there more? On other subjects? And most importantly, how can I find them on my own?
Actually, the epsilon/delta structure of analysis we use today was put together towards the end of the nineteenth century. The formulation of the Riemann integral that shows up in calculus books today is from the early twentieth century. A huge amount of calculus is still be created. The problem is that very little of the excitement of the field has trickled back down to calculus teaching, which ceased to develop in any real sense about fifty years ago.
And actually the waltz is alive and well, and still changing. It's divided into two major dances, slow waltz and Viennese waltz. Honing and developing the style and technique is an ongoing project in international ballroom dance. So a series of books on the latest trends in waltzing would actually be quite interesting, and I believe they exist.
Integral Anomoly: NEO
Integrate the equation for a finite line and we get 'Integral Anomolies': +C & -C
To solve the equations the C's must cancel out, just like Agent Smith/NEO had to infect NEO/Agent Smith to solve the equation.
CALCULUS SOLVED THE MATRIX
Actually, in the newer additions of "Calculus Made Easy", (a classic in "dummy" or rote calculus) Martin Gardner addresses why Calculus books are so thick (and cost so much). Frankly, companies are afraid to leave anything out. Quite often these books are used for 3 classes (up to multivariate calculus). When a professor and/or department are looking at a calculus book they are often factoring in many things. At the big engineering schools students from numerous departments will be taking this course. Thus the need to cover a little bit of everything. You've got to worry about the accreditation boards. You've also got to factor in the poor high school preperation of the average calculus student. Plus, you've got to add in the high failure rate (the books shouldn't make the class harder).
Frankly, I don't mind spending a bit of money on the books for any introductory course sequences. If the books are good, I'd use them for reference.
I'd love to see more open source math books. With that said, why not use a Dover book. Dover publications often reprints classics in the field. These books are dirt cheap. Some people love Dover books and some people loath them. Still, you can't beat the price.
Frankly, I like Micheal Spivak's Calculus books. If you want a quick refresher (i.e. if you're an engineer, etc) try "Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus P. Thompson.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
I remember one math book i was reading(calc or linear algebra). I had no idea what the author was talking about.
Completely lost I plodded through the remaining pages in the section.
I then looked at the questions and could answer every one correctly. I had already learned what the book was trying to teach and still couldn't understand the chapter.
2. Any section entitled "Applications of ..." is going to be a lot of work.
you can basically get the internation editions instead, which is basically the identical book - soft covered, a quarter of the price here, and are sold anywhere outside of north america. it's illegal to be sold here in NA, so it's awefully hard to find them on the web. ... but guess what, people dont care anymore and we can get them off ebay now. if i'm going to spend to get a photocopied version of a textbook, it might be a better idea to get an international edition - especially a book like sedra & smith...
my blog
For those not quite ready for the leap to calculus, I've found this an excellent resource, Math for Morons like Us.
Side note: With the advent of no-overhead Publishing on Demand, from the likes of Lulu and Cafe Press, it seems to me a professor could put one of these electronic text in book form and sell it directly to students for $30 a pop, and still make a profit.
What were you expecting?
I made this comment upstream, but I think it bears repeating.
With the advent of no-overhead Publishing on demand, it seems to me that said professors could either adapt some of these open source resources, or write their own textbooks, and publish them for $30, and still make $10 a pop.
Sounds like a win to me.
What were you expecting?
It's a JOKE! A COMPLIMENT by way of a joke!
It's a nerd poking fun at someone else for being a nerd in the friendliest way possible.
The "Techniques of Integration" have gone out of vogue since the advent of programs that are highly efficient at doing advanced integration have become popular in school. My calculus courses even had a lab section devoted to learning how to use Mathematica.
The problem is that it breeds students who are completely incapable of actually *doing* or *understanding*, but who have memorized those tables. If you run into something that doesn't fit the mold of those tables you have memorized you have to look it up and make something else fit that pattern, and this can be a fairly nontrivial thing.
Also, if your memory is even slightly rusty you have no one of double checking to see if you are right without resorting to a book or a program. No thanks.
We let people off the hook far too easily. We let them use calculators on tests before they are even capable of having a grasp on the theory. This results in students who panic when they see something that doesn't fit with their preconceived set of molds. I remember sitting through a lecture before a test in Advanced Engineering Math and watching the students (all engineering students who had math through Diff Eq) around me *literally shake* as the professor went over a Laplacian PDE that involved recognizing a Fourier transform.
The (two) math people in the class had no issues with it because we weren't dependent on something else to think for us.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
The first obstacle potential readers will encounter is that the book is provided in PostScript format, with hideous bitmapped type 3 fonts embedded. This makes it virtually impossible to view the book on a monitor in any legible representation, although it looks fine when you print it out. The typical Windows or MacOS user will give up long before that point.
/usr/bin/pstopdf is so hard to use on Mac OS X.
Yeah, because
Reply to this if you think that you can help with this project, and I'll contact you (ah, contact info may be useful also). Basically anyone who is interested in contributing text or helping with technical is really needed.
Note: please don't slashdot above server too badly, uni admins might not like it.
I can't imagine that college students, most of whom already carry laptops (even when they're not required by the school) wouldn't prefer to get electronic copies of their books over the monster tomes most colleges seem to use.
I mean, if you could get an e-copy of the textbook (even node-locked to your laptop with DRM or whatever), who'd want to carry the 5-pounder? Ok - so there might be a few who habitually ruin their books' resale values by making notes or highlighting or whatever, but you can even do that with a lot of ebook readers, now.
Or, the ebook could be at least available to those who buy the wood pulp.
This, to me, is what makes it most glaringly obvious that it's the publishing industry, not the marketplace that doesn't want the e-books.
This book is from a set of lectures on calculus given by visiting professor Evgeny Shchepin at Uppsala University in 2001. The first obstacle potential readers will encounter is that the book is provided in PostScript format, with hideous bitmapped type 3 fonts embedded.
The fonts aren't hideous. You just forgot to turn anti-aliasing on in your PostScript renderer.
"With a resale value of about half that, the book itself was a terrible investment."
That's one way to look at things. Now try this. What did you get out of the book knowledgewise? How much money will you make in your new career as investment counsuler? Seems like that book was a better investment than you thought.
and, you are correct, leave hell out of it, especially when Texas and Florida are the largest adoption states. no snakes or carved pumkins either! you wouldn't want to reinforce a satanic holiday!
that said, most kids don't play polo, golf or sail very often, so you would want materials which they could relate to. it is the law of averages, or tyrany of the majority, whichever you prefer. isn't it odd that a republican might find such a list revolting, and at the same time would be the primary reason such a list exists?
I'm currently looking for calculus books in French geared towards students going for degrees in business, psychology, etc.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It gives a much more in depth understanding about the concepts that make up the calculus, and is an excellent introduction into the real world of mathematics. Not for beginners, however.
God bless you, Y.P.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Hey, ReDubyacan: Have you ever heard Bush complete a sentence on his own (without an earphone or teleprompter or cue cards)?
Very truly yours,
K. Trout
The embedded Postscript fonts don't have to look bad. I advise using GhostScript to view PS and PDF files, since it makes the fonts look nice on the screen. If you use Linux, chances are you already have this installed.
http://cnx.rice.edu
It's a system for developing, sharing, and delivering course (or other) content, all under a creative commons license. Participation is open to the public. It's great!
Seriously, Ben's pronouncements about "what the web is basically about" are both subjective and irrelevent. Whatever the early Web was about, it certainly wasn't distributing math texts. Which is why not a single one of the texts he reviews actually uses Web technology, except as way of copying a PDF or Postscript file from one computer to another. This is something you could certainly do without a Web, or even without an Internet.
The idea of "open source" textbooks strikes me as a pretty good one. But if you want to get the idea accepted, you should avoid both the simplistic pronouncements and the self-righteous finger pointing. I, for one, am deeply offended at implication that there's something wrong with using the web to buy and sell things. And if you want instructors to change the texts they require, you're not going to get their cooperation by accusing them of gouging their students, either through ignorance or greed.
other than that it's pretty cool, though.
Enjoy!
I am looking for an open source math project to develop educational software that could take a person from basic math (k-8 level) through algebra and on to calculus and beyond. This would be for anyone who needs a little bit more structure than simply reading a text book by themselves can provide but doesn't want to do (or might not be able to afford to do) a formal online course. What I'm thinking of is a program that would do everything from assessing the starting level to suggesting further areas to explore in various applied topics. Something like the best of Stanford's EPGY math courseware without the Math Races (or you could opt in for math drill if you like). I've been looking at commercial versions and not finding anything as user friendly as what I have in mind.
I'm thinking that Python might be a useful starting place...any ideas?
lots of free books http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlineb ooks.html
Shouldn't we form a "coalition of students for rules and quality of textbooks"? Then set out a few rules for the university system of textbooks.
/. article.
1. Textbooks cannot be updated of a time less than FIVE years unless SIGNIFICANT change has happened in the subject matter. Would have to pass coalition review. (no more updating the books with only a few different colors and different pictures)
2. Regardless if a CD came with the book, copies and updates to any software sold with book should be online. Seeing as software gets updated pretty often.
3. Irregularities to a books printing (corrections) shall be corrected and publishded online. This shall also be in an easy to print fashion such as PDF. (no more updating the book for a few typos)
4. A rating system for books shall be created that will rate various aspects of the books and particular benefits and problems with regards to the programs they are teaching. This shall be by students, teachers, and the coalition. Teachers would be pressured to pick high rated books. (I find that many of the books in my engineering studies are really heady and not really practical to most engineers. Or have little discussion of the industry (real world) that applys)
5. The coalition would also try to help lead the way in electronic textbooks and testing of various tablets and other tools in their implementation. They would also pressure the book companies to offer electronic versions for sale (with obvious copy protections of course). (Hey, most people say that some sort of electronic tablet may be the way of the future in classrooms but I have seen little testing of such new devices at the colleges I have been around)
6. Pressure book companies to put out less glitsy or useless add-ons, and more usefull teaching aids. Then put pressure on professors to make good use of such tools. (How many times have I been in a class that had a books with either a bunch of useless extras that I had to pay for that werent used, or usefull addons that the professor didn't use (which would have GREATLY helped teach the subject matter)? TONS OF TIMES!)
7. In a slightly off kilter note, the coalition should pressure to put notes to the class online. Including sylabus and important course material. Behind a password if need be.
8. Support, editing, and comments by coalition for such free online textbooks as listed in origional
If such a group exists as the coalition, they shure don't seem to be very effective. Every student in college should know who they are if they were effective. "Here is your student registration AND membership card in the Coalition of students for kick ass textbooks"
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Calculus volumes 1 and 2 by Tom Apostol (1967, 1969)
Mathematical Analysis by Tom Apostol (1974)
Introduction to Probability Theory And Its Applications volumes 1 and 2 by Feller (1968, 1971)
Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Walter Rudin (1976)
Real and Complex Analysis by Walter Rudin (1986)
Functional Analysis by Walter Rudin (1991)
My gosh...they are expensive!
But no way would my mathematics library be complete without them and others of similar quality.
They're OLD and EXPENSIVE, but they're the BEST.
Of course, for reasonably priced math books, you can't beat Dover publications.
The American Mathematical Society has some reasonable and excellent books in their bookstore., not to mention a few free ones as well.
I've reviewed five calculus textbooks that are either free as in speech or free as in beer."
Is it safe to say you've reviewed all the "derivative" works as well?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Now the authors biases have been replaced with the rule makers.
I had a real rush of pleasant memories when I saw Keisler's book reviewed here. I'm sorry the parent poster had a bad experience with a lousy professor using Keisler's book before it was finished.
My older brother bought me a copy of Keisler's book as a birthday present in 1977 as I was just finishing high school. (My high school didn't offer calculus.) I read the book on my own over the summer, doing a section or two a day after I got home from my summer job working maintenance at a nursing home. I found it very clear and interesting reading, although I do confess to being a math nut.
By the end of the summer I'd gotten through two semesters' worth. I was able to test out of the first two semesters of calculus (with A's) and started third semester calculus in my freshman year. It was a nice start on my major.
I didn't find it a problem to switch from infinitesimals to the standard epsilon/delta limits-based development. Keisler explains the limit approach too, after he's gotten you a firm intuitive grounding using infinitesimals. Checking the index on my copy of the 1976 edition, the discussion starts on page 299. I had made it well past that part by the time I started third semester calculus with the standard approach.
"However, if you've got expertise you'd like to contribute to the public, that might be an easy place for you to do it."
And yet the irony is lost. Were did this "expertise" come from? The very system decried.
Calculus may not have change that much, but what changed is the way we use it.
That, however, does not justify the insane "upgrade cycle" of the textbook industry.
On the other hand, sometimes important changes are made to the way the material is presented. I just got a new edition of my favorite discrete math textbook, and some parts of the book are completely rewritten, I think the new edition really is worth.
Sometimes the new edition is actually worse than the old one. Couple years ago I was looking for a algebra and trig textbook for my class, and I found a very nice book by Lars Hormander. When I tried to order it, they sent me the new edition. It was bad, virtually indistinguishable from any other bad algebra and trig textbook on the market.
AccountKiller
I think the internet IS about distribution. Sure the grey or black markets always utilize new channels first. Porn drove VCR sales. Porn drives the internet. That's only because porn isn't run by wall street. Heck, there's probably more web based, technological innovation in pornography than most dot-coms. Of course the business has a higher ROI that most. That doesn't hurt.
Frankly, if big business didn't have a grapple hold on music, movies, and media we'd see quite the renaissance of art on the web. It's happening slowly. The tide is turning. Eventually some artist will get it. They will produce a piece of content so thought-provoking so as to avoid the mainstream media and go directly to the people. Heck, look at the "Drudge Report". Say what you will about his journalistic standards. Herst was a muck-racker too.
In some ways the internet was always about exchanging math texts. The early internet (newsgroups and email) was populated by mostly academics discussing research. Sure this is a much more formal and evolved extension of that. However, I think the spirit remains the same.
You said it yourself, these books use web technology in a special way. They use the web as a distribution channel. Using your reasoning, an mp3 doesn't use web technology. Yet, ask the MPAA or any teenager and the terms mp3 and the web are pratically synonymous. It's all about distribution.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
seen http://planetmath.org/ ?
I'm interested in this "open content" education stuff myself. I'm in the UK, and have my own sob stories from my maths education. The syllabi and exam papers for A-Level maths (16 - 18 years of age usually) are (I believe) copyrighted, and the book the college used for A-level maths was appauling.
Education seems to be in a state of disarray generally, and subverting the formal education system with "open content" seems to be the way to go, as with open source software.
GrimRC
I've converted Keisler's calculus textbook to full text-searchable DjVu and put it up in both bundled (single file to download) and unbundled (many files for fast browsing) formats. Enjoy!
For those who don't yet know, DjVu is a free, highly effective compression format for scanned documents. Conversion from PDF to DjVu shrank the Keisler from 24MB to 10MB without perceptible loss in quality, and added incremental loading, fast browsing, and (most importantly) full-text search capabilities. Get the free viewer.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
Not to mention that selling your books to the bookstores not only nets you about a tenth of what you paid, but allows the bookstore to sell said book back to your classmates for about nine-tenths of what you paid for it. Break the cycle. Sell your books yourself. It's generally not difficult in the least.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
For that matter, you don't even need computers to have OS textbooks. Fifty years ago, somebody could have said, "Calculus texts cost too much. I'll get together with some buddies, and we'll write a good one, maybe borrow some public domain material. Then we'll sell it at cost to whoever wants it. Won't be free, but it'll save students a lot of money."
So why didn't anybody ever do that?
...do those stupid NASA contractors continue to use English units? Inquiring minds want to know!
For math and science books yeah making them politically correct is no big deal, but when you get to arts and humanities you really need to leave those 'bad' words in them. There are American history books now that leave out important events because it would be too tough to discuss them in a politically correct way.
So are these fads good or bad?
- Advanced Calculus of Several Variables by C.H. Edwards, Jr
- Introductory Real Analysis by Kolmogorov (tr. Fomin)
Neither of these books are suited for the beginning calculus student, unless said student is very eager about mathematics, but I haven't been a beginning calculus student for many years now and at the time I didn't know Dover even existed. I'm sure if you looked hard enough you could find a good, elementary calculus text from Dover and you'd only have to pay $10 or $15 for it.