Five Free Calculus Textbooks

Ben Crowell writes: "The economics of college textbooks is goofy, because the person who picks the book isn't the person who has to pay for it. Combined with the increasing consolidation of the publishing industry, this has blown the lid off of textbook prices over the last decade. But remember what the World-Wide Web was basically about before the Dot-Com Detour? It wasn't about marketing dog food, it was about democratizing publishing. Many textbook authors these days are using the internet to bypass the traditional publishing system, making their books available for free downloading. Although MIT's Open Courseware project gets most of the press, the movement started before that, and is going strong. In this article, I've reviewed five calculus textbooks that are either free as in speech or free as in beer." Read on for Crowell's take on each of the five books he's selected -- and pass the review on to any math teachers you know. (See each) author (See each) pages (See each) publisher (See each) rating (See each) reviewer Ben Crowell ISBN (n/a) summary (See each)

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.

After that, I began to see the hyperreal numbers as simply another tool for calculating things.

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.

Comments

See any serious problems with this story?

[strictnein]

See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor.

Yeah... it's an f'en review of five calc books. The author should be committed and never allowed to enter society again.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[aePrime]

So, you're saying there's a limit as reviewed_calc_books --> infinity such that in the relation

author_insanity
----------------
reviewedd_cal c_books

author_insanity approaches infinity?

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[necrogram]

talk about self abuse. I hate to see their idea of fun

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[orthogonal]

Yeah... it's an f'en review of five calc books. The author should be committed and never allowed to enter society again.

Me too ! I agree! Me too!

God forbid that anyone -- much less the readers of a site "for nerds [about] stuff that matters' should deviate from a steady diet of Star Wars, Tentacle Anime, and MMORGS.

Because it's more important to know the exact blue-prints of the X-Wing, Y-Wing and Z-Wing fighters than to understand physics -- and that the laws of physics don't actually allow the aerobatic maneuvers these fictional starships are depicted as making.

God forbid that we should know the calculus! Better we should be techno-peasants, with metaphorical manure between our toes, unable to comprehend the technical wizardry we gawp at in the movie houses.

The only reason we all have comparatively cheap PCs on our desks -- or the special effects that makes movies like Star Wars so absorbing (if inaccurate), or the ability to download Anime film or play MMORGS -- is because someone, lots of someones, took the time to learn the calculus -- and metallurgy, and materials engineering, and chemical engineering, and electrical engineering, and even computer science.

So before you "ban" the reviewer from society, please understand that the reason your sole amusement isn't getting chased by a wild boar as each of you tries to make the other lunch, is because of "dweebs" like the reviewer who care about the science and technology that created the society that allows you to have it so good and so easy.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[Saarus]

I think that's true only if author_insanity > 0, though you may be able to apply L'Hopital's Rule in that case - I can't remember.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[nodwick]

This is a tad off-topic, but I couldn't resist tossing in another calculus goodie I saw on a LiveJournal post a while back. For those not familiar with it, MIT hosts an Integration Bee every January -- kinda like a spelling bee, but with (obviously) integrating.

evelio (evelio) wrote, @ 2004-01-23 15:24:00

I love MIT

>Geek thing #1
A friend of mine won the Integration Bee at MIT. He got $50 of Certificates to Toscis (Ice cream place) and a baseball cap.

>Geek thing #2:
Another friend wrote him this poem:

I love you;
You are my hero.
My love for you is 1/x
as x approaches 0.

>Geek thing #3:
To which another friend of mine replied: Wait Wait! As x approaches zero from which direction?

Yes we are geeks. And damn proud of it too.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[Octorian]

I was once in a class where a foreign TA (are domestics even allowed?) was giving the lecture that day, and he referred to something called "ell-hospital's rule". ;-)

Thankfully, I knew it was really pronounced "low-pital's rule", like most students in the class, and got a little chuckle about it.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[gangien]

God forbid someone make a joke.
God forbid someone not take said joke as a joke.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[ZTiger]

strictnein is obviously not of true geek caliber and should be a /. reader.

You status as nerd or geek is hereby revoked.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[rwebb]

Also (somewhat) depressing is that none of the sites appear to be /.ed yet.

The Garrett paper looks wonderful; just the thing my ancient brain needs.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[terrab0t]

You are the first reader I've decided to add to my "friend list". I don't know what this list does exactly, but judging by the name, I feel you should be on it.

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[repressitol]

Please, calm down. Rest assured, we recognize the *need* for people like you so we can sit comfortably in high-paying, brain-dead jobs *without* having to suffer through real work like calculus. After all, isn't that what the low-payed engineers are for? ;)

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[mvanhorn]

If you really want a MeFi account, contact the owner via email with something post-worthy. It worked for me...

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[orthogonal]

If you really want a MeFi account, contact the owner via email with something post-worthy. It worked for me...

You mean, something for their Front Page? I have to admit, I put up that .sig when I saw MeFi had posted the Calculus Slashdot story.

I've become a big MeFi reader, and sometimes I just itch to contribute my two-cents worth.

Do you think a snapshot of my Slashdot posting history would help (eleven +5s in my last 24)?

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[nempo]

Then author_insanity -> infinity would mean that in theory reviewedd_calc_books is neglectable. This means that you can be insane without doing calculus review...we all knew that!

Re:See any serious problems with this story?

[Com2Kid]

• I was once in a class where a foreign TA (are domestics even allowed?) was giving the lecture that day, and he referred to something called "ell-hospital's rule". ;-)
• 
  
  Thankfully, I knew it was really pronounced "low-pital's rule", like most students in the class, and got a little chuckle about it.
  

Now see, in MY calculus class, we didn't know any better, and the teacher (who is an insanely smart guy mind you) remarked "bah, european names, can't pronounce them anyways."

(all of three "white" people in the class, and that is counting the proffesor, everybody else asian).

For the next calculus class we had an instructor who's parents came from Spain so he quickly corrected us all on the correct pronouncian. :)

Democratizing publishing?

[Kenja]

"But remember what the World-Wide Web was basically about before the Dot-Com Detour? It wasn't about marketing dog food, it was about democratizing publishing."

It was about porn and you know it. Then again, perhaps that IS democratizing publishing. Never mind.

Re:Democratizing publishing?

[Trolling4Dollars]

Apparently you've been proven wrong. Again. :P

wow

[first.last]

fell asleep after the third paragraph....pretty much what I did in calc and analytical statistics classes in college.

Re:wow

[Limburgher]

Me too. Also took Calc 3 when it wasn't required. STUPIDSTUPIDSTUPID! :)

Also, re your sig, you can't post and mod the same discussion.

Re:wow

[Skater]

Hey! I'm a statistician, you insensitive...zzzz...

--RJ

Re:wow

[CAlworth1]

>Also, re your sig, you can't post and mod the same discussion. not to be obvious, but first, read what first.last wrote about a similiar comment above, and second, realize that he is making a joke. By following his suggestion, you can't mod him down...

Price != Quality

[elid]

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.

Re:Price != Quality

[tkajstura]

I agree. Many textbooks are used because of ties to the faculty of the deptartment. For instance, if a professor at a given university writes a textbook, and has a lot of say in what goes on in the deptartment, you can be sure that soon enough most other professors in the deptartment will be using their book. It's just the way university politics go.

Re:Price != Quality

[zenetik]

I took an investment class a couple of semesters ago and the textbook cost $120 brand new. With a resale value of about half that, the book itself was a terrible investment.

Re:Price != Quality

[Rick the Red]

Yeah, but it was the textbook they required, so you had to buy it. None of these five alternatives would do you a damn bit of good when the Prof said, "Read pages 128-154 and do problems 3.15 through 3.24 by tomorrow."

Re:Price != Quality

[Tassach]

Amen.

Reading the reviews above, the impression I'm left with is that they all suck, to varying degrees. How about a review of a Calculus book, suitable for self-instruction, which DOESN'T suck? (Of course, that presupposes that such a beast actually exists, or is even possible to create). Major bonus points for a single book which teaches the related physics concepts alongside the related mathmatical concepts.

Re:Price != Quality

[KingOfBLASH]

That's a very good point. Some years ago (when I was still in school), I found out (thanks to the strong dollar and subsidies or something), you could buy textbooks from amazon.co.uk for 25% to 50% of what you could buy in the US. So I figured, well and good, and bought all my books online. I saved several hundred dollars -- but had to buy a chemistry text book here in the US again, because I was shipped the international edition -- and the problem sets were completely different. <sighs />

Re:Price != Quality

[SkunkPussy]

The publishers send loads of books out for free to lecturers in the hopes that the lecturer will recommend this text to the students that year.
This ends in the ludicrous situation of some lecturers having 3 different editions of the same text, and the competing/equivalent books from other publishers.
Some of the lecturers handle this well by giving surplus books away to those who ask.

Re:Price != Quality

[kannibal_klown]

LOL. It was worse where I went. You'd get $20 for selling a $100+ book back to the school, in pristine condition.

A friend of mine bought a brand new Physics book. He never used it, because he started using Schuam's outlines and other books. When he went to return/resell it, he got enough for a burger and fries at the local McDonalds.

College textbooks are such a scam.

Re:Price != Quality

[pete-classic]

This seems to be a new edition of the book I used to prime myself on Calculus.

I'm not so sure it is a matter of sucks/doesn't suck, as much as strengths and weaknesses, or applicablity to one audience or another.

I.e. no text could serve equally well for a University Math course, a High School survey course and someone who wants to teach himself the rudiments of the topic.

That said, I think that the book I linked above is a good (i.e. doesn't suck) book for self-instruction, given that the student has a strong Algebra and Trig background AND is willing to work HARD to grasp the topics.

-Peter

Re:Price != Quality

[nexthec]

I'm taking an AC drives course this semester, and the book is written by my several of my professors major professor during their grad days. Its a Decent book, content wise, however, its 167 dollars (167!) and one of my friends already had a page rip out! On the other hand my symetrical componets book has been out of regular print for a while so the publisher just let them copy it. 20 bucks! woo!

Re:Price != Quality

[tribulation2004]

For relatively static topics like elementary mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, English, etc. there really is no reason to change a textbook more often than say, every 10 years (and really only so that the application sections remain relevant). I think that one of the big issues with going to a free web-based, static course text is the homework problems. See if you follow my logic: Profs are basically lazy (when it comes to teaching undergrad courses that is), and love to assign questions from the textbook - if the textbook itself is static, they have to make up their own questions, and solve them (otherwise the answers to all questions would become common knowledge after a semester or two). I took a discrete mathematics course a few years ago where I literally was able to search the web using the exact question to get answers to questions I wasn't sure of - the prof was so lazy that he was plagiarizing other assignments! Don't discount the fact that a lot of book publishers bribe profs with expensive lunches, publishing offers, etc. It wouldn't surpise me to know that less ethical profs are also taking kickbacks based on volume (which decrases significantly when used books come into play). The solution? Some profs are sympathetic to the plight of the poor student. I've e-mailed this article to two of my college professors, maybe it will cause someone to at least think about it, but I'm not hopeful. Surely a community developped, open, free (as in beer!), free (as in freedom!) textbook is superior to something written by one or two authors and reviewed by only a handful of others.

Re:Price != Quality

[ari_j]

deptartment

This is definitely not the correct spelling of this word. You are most likely thinking along the lines that, "dept." being the abbreviation, the word must begin with those letters. Do you live in an aptpartment or make a dental apptointment?

In a more general sense, I wonder if people are learning to read in an environment too inundated with abbreviations to learn actual words. The fluency level of most college-educated English speakers (in all countries) is bad enough without this kind of nonsense.

Re:Price != Quality

[pjt33]

Do all your lecturers do that, or are some good enough at the subject they lecture to write their own problems?

Re:Price != Quality

[HeghmoH]

That's classic. Prof uses the internet to copy questions, and then the students use the internet to copy the answers. That reminds me of the story about the prof who decides that lecturing is too much work, so he records all of his lectures to tape and just lets the machine play in the classroom. Pretty soon the students get the same idea, and not long after the room is filled with tape recorders, no student or professor in sight.

Re:Price != Quality

[shannara256]

Do all your lecturers do that, or are some good enough at the subject they lecture to write their own problems?

All my lecturers do that. It's not an issue of being good or bad, it's an issue of time and efficiency. You need to have a textbook anyway: not all students learn best by listening to you talk, and even those students are going to miss class every once in a while. So, since you have a textbook, why not use all it has to offer?

The other thing about writing your own problems is that, in subjects such as calculus, it's pretty easy to write problems which range from ridiculously hard to literally impossible, just by adding one little term to an otherwise simple equation. Much better to use the textbook, which has been (exhaustively, one would hope) checked for such things, and which has answers (although usually not solutions, which most teachers require) in the back of the book, which IS helpful to students.

The difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher, then, is how they respond when you ask for help on a certain problem. My highly excellent physics teacher (Leonid Minkin) reads the problem from the book, writes it on the board, and then solves it. My crappy math teacher looks up the problem in his notes, and then copies his notes onto the board, and still manages to get confused in the process. They both assign problems from the book, but one is much better than the other.

Re:Price != Quality

[whmac33]

Or it was a typo...

Or a typographical error. Oops I started the real word with the abbreviation. Crap I did it again.

Oh Well

Re:Price != Quality

[Rick the Red]

Sure, they wrote their own problems -- they were called "tests."

Re:Price != Quality

[jazman_777]

College textbooks are such a scam.

When I was at Va. Tech, the bookstore was run by the Athletic Association. Double Scam [tm].

Re:Price != Quality

[bcl]

Real Genius (imdb). One of my favorite scenes from the movie is the room full of recorders. That and Michelle Meyrink.

Re:Price != Quality

[Garak]

Yea I just got back from a lectur where I have edition 5(thats all the collage book store had), most of the class have edition 4 and the instuctor is still giving references to edition 3.

Re:Price != Quality

[john82]

"I saved several hundred dollars -- but had to buy a chemistry text book here in the US again, because I was shipped the international edition -- and the problem sets were completely different. "

See: metric v. english units of measure; satellite mission to mars

Re:Price != Quality

[harks]

I've never had a problem with international editions, i've used three or four and they have all been character for character exactly the same. The problem with textbook shopping online is you've got all that added time for shipping when you can't use the book for the class, and it isn't always possible to know exactly what book you're going to need for the class weeks before the class starts. Added to that, you've got a bigger problem if you have a deadbeat seller, problems can take weeks to work out and meanwhile you're in the class with no book.

Re:Price != Quality

[Carmody]

My highly excellent physics teacher (Leonid Minkin) reads the problem from the book, writes it on the board, and then solves it

He sounds like a good teacher. A great teacher would write it on the board, and get YOU to solve it.

Re:Price != Quality

[KingOfBLASH]

Modern day techninical textbooks use metric and not English units, even in the US. My other 4 text books were the same editions as the US versions.

Re:Price != Quality

[pjt33]

You need to have a textbook anyway

Every single one of my lecturers wrote their own notes. In one case, they were extracted from a textbook the lecturer had written, but otherwise they were custom-made. An investment of time, sure, but it let them handle things the way they wanted to, they could fix errors from year to year, but not be subject to the re-ordering whims of another, and students just had to turn up to a lecture to pick up some notes rather than try to find somewhere selling a textbook for a reasonable price.

Re:Price != Quality

[bcrowell]

Yeah, but it was the textbook they required, so you had to buy it. None of these five alternatives would do you a damn bit of good when the Prof said, "Read pages 128-154 and do problems 3.15 through 3.24 by tomorrow."
The idea is for a professor to actually adopt a free book as the official, required book for the course. Not to be too immodest, but it has been known to happen.

Unfortunately, however, of the five books I reviewed here, I don't really feel that any of them make good prospects for adoption. Keisler is, IMO, a very cool book, but it's not copylefted, which means it's likely to evaporate off the web as soon as the author either loses interest in maintaining his web site, or dies. Nobody is going to adopt a book that's a pig in a poke like that. And there's currently no way to correct an error or update the book, both for legal reasons and because the author himself doesn't have it in editable form on a computer.

I think both of the copylefted ones are pretty good books over all, but for the reasons given in my reviews, I don't think either one is really going to get adopted widely. I did talk to Garrett by e-mail, and he expressed an interest in fleshing out his book a little (and fixing the licensing problem), if people showed interest.

Re:Price != Quality

[gantrep]

Ron Paul.

Re:Price != Quality

[bcrowell]

For relatively static topics like elementary mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, English, etc. there really is no reason to change a textbook more often than say, every 10 years (and really only so that the application sections remain relevant).
There is at least one very practical reason, which is that accreditation boards will not accredit your school if you're using books more than about 5 years old. However, the publishers do bring out new editions of the big commercial textbooks even more often than that (typically every 2-3 years), because it kills off the used book market.

I think that one of the big issues with going to a free web-based, static course text is the homework problems
Why does free and web-based correlate with static? It's actually a lot easier to change a digital book than it is to change a printed book.

Re:Price != Quality

[tribulation2004]

> Why does free and web-based correlate with static? > It's actually a lot easier to change a digital > book than it is to change a printed book. Agreed. Static topic = topic in which the subject matter doesn't really change very often, calculus being the perfect example. Agreed that the question sets themselves can evolve, but the subject matter probably won't (much). My point is that if the text is free (as in freedom), so is the solution guide - ergo, it's of no value to profs who like to assign problems from a text. I've never met a professor yet who was eager for more work (at least at the undergrad-level), and authoring their own assignments, and solving them is undoubtedly a lot of work.

Re:Price != Quality

[bcrowell]

My point is that if the text is free (as in freedom), so is the solution guide - ergo, it's of no value to profs who like to assign problems from a text.
What I do with my own physics textbooks is to make the books free (as in speech) and the solutions not free (as in speech). I provide the solutions on a CD to instructors who have adopted the book, and I don't charge them money, but it's under a very strict, proprietary license. Basically all they're allowed to do is hand out solution sets on paper to their students. (There's also an answer checker online, which students can use to see if they got the right answers. There are also some problems with complete worked solutions in the back of the book.)

Re:Price != Quality

[ari_j]

I thought it was a typo at first, but when you make the same mistake three out of three times in a short comment, and when said typo would be difficult to accomplish (I have a hard time even typing 'deptartment' - this is not a naturally-occurring typo), it's a safe bet that it's an ingrained spelling habit. Giving me two counterexamples doesn't make it acceptable. Care to utilize any other fallacies? Maybe argumentum ad baculum?

On an even further off-topic note, I sometimes wish I could take an extra point or two off from my Karma Bonus, so I could post under my own name without risk of further off-topic moderation points being wasted on me - or maybe that's the point. ;-D

Re:Price != Quality

[thogard]

Good ole accreditation boards. I went to University of Missouri- Columbia and was waiting for a computer engineering degree to get accredited. It never happened. I called the accreditation board and asked them what other schools were accredited and they couldn't name one that I would have wanted to go to. It was just a scam to get the school to pay some ivory tower guys an extra $20 grand. A few years after that someone was nailed for selling degrees from non-accredited schools. They guy then went on to set up his own accreditation board and started taking money from schools and students.

Re:Price != Quality

[Colonel Cholling]

I found out (thanks to the strong dollar and subsidies or something), you could buy textbooks from amazon.co.uk for 25% to 50% of what you could buy in the US.

You ain't kidding! I got a $100 textbook from the UK for only 54.37 quid! (You don't even want to know how much they tried to scalp me when I ordered from Japan, though.)

Re:Price != Quality

[KingOfBLASH]

I paid US dollars not UK Pounds.

Re:Price != Quality

[shannara256]

> A great teacher would write it on the board, and get YOU to solve it.

Perhaps, but that doesn't work so well in a lecture format. He may do that when you get help from him one-on-one, but I don't know.

Re:Price != Quality

[Vann_v2]

You need to have a textbook anyway: not all students learn best by listening to you talk, and even those students are going to miss class every once in a while.

Thankfully, we have libraries for just this problem! The mathematics department at my university has a nice library where you can find all the commonly used textbooks, and certainly any text covering whatever topic you wanted to learn that day.

Statistics Textbooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that in my present line of work, statistics references would be more helpful.

Does any such beast exist?

Re:Statistics Textbooks?

[BoomerSooner]

This book is worth every dollar I spent.

The author is nice too. When I couldn't figure out a problem instead of helping me, he pointed me to the pages I missed in his book (a round about way of making sure I actually bought the book no doubt, but helpful none the less).

Re:Statistics Textbooks?

[Cornelius the Great]

I don't know about statistics, but I found this site helpful.

Then again, I'm more interested in theoretical mathematics (abstract alebra, topology, etc) than statistics. You'll find a basic probability text that may or may not help, depending on your ability.

Re:Statistics Textbooks?

[gnu-generation-one]

"statistics references would be more helpful"

Only just started, but you can update the book if you're in a "let's help someone" mood one night:

http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Statistics

Re:Statistics Textbooks?

[gnu-generation-one]

Here's the other one:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/Probabilityand Statistics.html

Re:Statistics Textbooks?

[kbmccarty]

For physics (especially particle physics), Statistical Data Analysis by Glen Cowan is very good at the grad student level. The book has its own home page here.

My deepest sympathies for you sacrifice

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the greatest act sacrifice by a reviewer since that Washington Post guy compared and contrasted the 5 latest colonoscopy devices.

Re:My deepest sympathies for you sacrifice

[Otter]

I think he came up with "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." and went looking for an opportunity to use it.

It _is_ a superbly turned phrase.

All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[bad enema]

- 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.

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[garcia]

- That the problems actually reflect what was "taught" in the examples.

I loved being "taught" what the examples showed and given a graded homework assignment only to find that 90% of the problems could not be solved with the given examples.

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[Larry David]

Good point. Is there any place where you can easily learn what all the symbols mean? Symbols are the whole reason I had trouble with higher mathematics.

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[foo fighter]

Here are two great calculus books. They are not free, but they are not expensive, they are easy to read, and you will learn much from them.

A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski, about $10 at Amazon.
You won't learn how to perform calculus from this, but it gives a historicaly overview of what the calculus is and why it is important. Some people complain the language is too "flowery" but I think it is very readable, even engaging, and a very nice contrast to typically dry textbooks.

Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson and Martin Gardner, about $25 at Amazon.
I recommend every Calc I student buy this and use it alongside their asigned text. Thompson originally published this in 1910 and Gardner updated and revised it in 1998. It has stood the test of time and sold millions of copies. It makes calculus easy with lucid commentary, relevant exercises, and a lack of the formality that often obscures other textbooks. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[bfields]

I loved being "taught" what the examples showed and given a graded homework assignment only to find that 90% of the problems could not be solved with the given examples.

Sorry. As a calculus teacher, my job isn't to teach you a step-by-step program for, say, maximizing a smooth function of two variables with a unique maximum on an open interval. You don't have to understand a darned thing to do that.

My job is to teach you some underlying concepts, and to give you practice using those concepts as tools to solve a variety of problems.

This means that while I will give students lots of examples, explain concepts as clearly as I possibly can, and do everything to help, I will *always* assign problems that require fundamentally different solutions from the solutions given in any of the examples.

I've seen a lot of frustrated freshman who've learned over the years to do homework by skimming a chapter quickly (if at all) before looking for the example that gives them a template to solve the particular problem. You have to get past that.

--Bruce Fields

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Symbols are the whole reason I had trouble with higher mathematics.

Reminds me of something a math teacher mentioned some time ago. Those symbols made math quite a bit easier. Just imagine how a prove would look like in plain text.

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[Daniel_Staal]

THANK YOU!

I failed Calc II, twice, because I couldn't find a teacher like you at the school I was going to. I cannot memorize, but teach me why something works and I'll blaze through anything you give me.

There are students who will hate you. But rest assured, there are others who will love you.

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... *skimming* ...I'm not sure what all this says... oh this looks like a good bit:

and do everything to help

I was confused on where to find the example for problem #6 you gave us yesterday. Maybe you can point it out to me?

Re:All I ask of a first year calculus book:

[msh210]

Amen, but I think not *all* problems should be different from ones seen: only some should. Calc students need rote practice, too.

You can contribute too.

[Black Parrot]

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.

Re:You can contribute too.

[Dachannien]

I really hope this is the future of academic textbook publishing. Maybe not the wiki model - it tends to leave works unfinished. But a planned "distributed" textbook system, where interested instructors each contribute a chapter or two to the finished book for free, combined with just-in-time at-cost publishing at the local college bookstore, would save college kids a bundle.

Even more important is the application of this concept to our cash-strapped public schools. States, counties, or school districts could JIT-publish their textbooks locally, saving a huge amount of cash and making replacement of ruined textbooks a lot easier and cheaper.

Re:You can contribute too.

[jdavidb]

If you ever get interested in printing books on demand, CafePress now offers that service.

Re:You can contribute too.

[bcrowell]

Even more important is the application of this concept to our cash-strapped public schools. States, counties, or school districts could JIT-publish their textbooks locally, saving a huge amount of cash and making replacement of ruined textbooks a lot easier and cheaper.
Yeah, the K-12 textbook situation is even worse than the college one, if you can believe that. I teach physics at a community college, and have always been dismayed at the low quality of the big commercial textbooks, but they smell like roses compared to junior high science books. K-12 science books are typically written by a committee of hacks who lack any real teaching or scientific credentials. Then they find some college professors who will allow them to put their names on it in return for some money. (I even read about one case where a college professor was invited to review a science book before publication, gave a bunch of negative comments, and found out later that the publisher had put his name on it, since he'd done so much work on it!) These books just suck to high heaven. They have lots of pictures and little tinted boxes and bells and whistles, but the content is usually full of errors, and it also doesn't tell a logical, understandable story.

It would be cool to see free textbooks make inroads in K-12, but unfortunately the politics of K-12 textbook adoption makes the college process look like a Quaker meeting...

Re:You can contribute too.

[Dachannien]

Agreed. When I was in high school (coming on ten years ago now!), our Chemistry II textbook was actually a freshman-chem college level textbook. We learned freshman-level chemistry, though it wasn't touted as an AP class. Upon arriving at college, I found that I'd already learned some of the things taught there.

The summer after freshman year of college, I went back to the school and visited my Chem/Physics teacher. She handed me a shiny new textbook, and told me that it was the new county-mandated book for second-year high school chemistry. I started flipping through it and was disgusted - there was virtually no actual chemistry in the book, and most of it was filled with pictures relevant to a text which pondered various politically-charged environmental topics.

Books

[PeaceTank]

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.

Re:Books

[Anonymous Coward]

>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.

Student: "I have a question about..."
Teacher: "RTFM!!!"
Student: "I did and I still don't understand ..."
Teacher: "Google IS YOUR FRIEND!"
Student: "I came up with 31, 208 results, most of them trying to sell me ..."
Teacher: "N3WBI3!!!"

Re:Books

[theparallax]

What does open source have to do with text books? I can't remember anyone compiling a calc book in the recent past. If you're talking about unlimited educational fair use, then please say what you mean and mean what you say. Let's not turn 'open source' into 'organic' or 'natural' or 'chemicals'.

Re:Books

[fishbowl]

>I can't remember anyone compiling a calc book in
>the recent past.

It is not uncommon for math papers and books to be published with LaTeX. That's still not strictly source code.

I don't understand why copyright protections can't be an expection for an author of anything. There really isn't anything that makes a computer program special. Not special in the sense that its author deserves separate rights under copyright law. At least I hope not, as it would open the door to an argument against the GPL on 14th amendment grounds, and the wicked witch would win.

Re:Books

[david_reese]

What does open source have to do with text books?

At least one of the books being reviewed is intended to be licensed under the GPL copyleft license. Also, some are released in LaTeX which is also open-source.

Applied Math

[1fitz2many]

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.

If you like free calculus books...

[Blackaxis]

www.lightandmatter.com has some free introductory physics texts that are pretty interesting.

Re:If you like free calculus books...

[An Onerous Coward]

Note that the author of the review is also the author of the Light and Matter books. Very cool guy. Erm, okay. I have a rather odd definition of "cool," but what he's doing could become very important.

Re:If you like free calculus books...

[jabberjaw]

Here is another text covering the basics of special relativity, it is decent for those with a passing interest in the subject IMHO.

Free as in Beer?

[RedA$$edMonkey]

Free beer and calculus books leads to a dangerous combination:

Drinking and Deriving.

Clickable Links

[Poisonous Drool]

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

Somehow...

[Sideshow Coward]

I can't picture Homer saying "Mmmmmmm... free math. *drool*

Aaaarrrgggghhhhh!

[DoctorScooby]

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!

Re:Aaaarrrgggghhhhh!

[ckaminski]

I can tell you for a FACT that trains travelling north of Boston at 35 or more miles per hour is a myth. :-)

Great, except...

[absurdist]

...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.

Re:Great, except...

[happyfrogcow]

Not only that, but you only get one side of the story when the teacher is also the author. In classes I took where the teacher wasn't the author, the teacher would often say, "now this is the way he does it, but this is an easier|faster|more intuitive way to do it." When the teacher is the author, your stuck usually learning only one way to do things, which is often the way it makes sense to someone who has known the subject for 30 years, and not always suitable to a newbie.

Re:Great, except...

[mdielmann]

Yep, that's one definition of self-centred bastard...

Re:Great, except...

[Tassach]

What's worse is when the professor uses your class as the beta test for his new book. That way you get to pay for the privilidge of proofreading his book for him.

I always hated taking classes where the professor wrote the book -- there was never any point in going to class, because everything they said in class was in the book verbatim. Call me idealistic, but I expect a professor to fill in the gaps the book leaves and to help me understand the difficult concepts.

Re:Great, except...

[bear_phillips]

I understand what you mean about college books. Can the same be said about elementary and high school books. Anyone know how elementary books are written? I had always guessed they were written by the staff of some mindless corporation.

Re:Great, except...

[happyfrogcow]

Wouldn't that be a conflict of interest?

No, they're usually only interested in one thing.

Re:Great, except...

[31415926535897]

Here's a great example of that (this guy really pissed me off).

Steven S. Zumdahl at UIUC wrote an Intro Chemistry book--they still seem to be using it there even though he doesn't teach that class anymore. Here's a link to their Chem 101 class: .

Every few years he would come out with a new edition of the book (he's on 6 right now), and the _only_ difference between each edition is the problems at the end of the chapters are scrambled (the numbers aren't even changed)!

I heard rumor that U of I was upset by his blatant misuse of his position there to force students to buy new textbooks, but I can't be certain that is true.

I had edition 4 or 5 when I went to school there, and when I tried to sell it back they would only give me $5 for it because of the new edition. I thought it was far more worthwhile (and entertaining) to keep it and then burn it.

Re:Great, except...

[Dinny]

I had a class where there professor wrote the main text book and edited the secondary book of assorted readings. You probably would have liked it. He willfully left things out of the book that he thought were important enough to teach to the class and test on.

Personally it fucking pissed me off that he didn't have the decence to put everything that he thought was important into the text book.

Re:Great, except...

[Idarubicin]

Every few years he would come out with a new edition of the book (he's on 6 right now), and the _only_ difference between each edition is the problems at the end of the chapters are scrambled (the numbers aren't even changed)!

I had a course in mathematical physics where I would get together with the professor (who didn't write the textbook) and several students after class and map out the changes between editions. I saved about a hundred bucks because I could use an old edition of the text.

Re:Great, except...

[Lil'wombat]

It gets better. I had Zumdahl back when the second edition was in use. FYI - His hobby is collecting and restoring old cars. He started with corvettes and moved on to 1930's era Rolls-Royces. I found it to be useful book though.

Re:Great, except...

[trinitrotoluene]

My grade 12 AP Physics teacher co-wrote the normal Grade 12 physics text.

Oddly enough, we used a different book in AP Physics.

Re:Great, except...

[bcrowell]

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.
I think you have an inflated idea of how much money professors typically make from textbooks. Most bring in almost nothing in royalties. Only a few of the big sellers are very profitable for their authors. It's the publishers that are driving the phenomenon you're talking about.

Re:Great, except...

[bcrowell]

you only get one side of the story when the teacher is also the author
This isn't a free-vs.-unfree issue at all. Every college textbook starts out as something the professor uses in his own classes with his own students. These aren't people who sit down at a word processor 40 hours a week churning out romance novels so they can pay the rent. Writing a textbook is typically not profitable at all, and if you're untenured, it also tends to hurt your evalutations from your tenure committee, which wants you doing research, not teaching or writing (ech) undergraduate textbooks. Free textbooks are just like unfree textbooks: if they're really good, they should get adopted by other people besides the author; but there's no way the author is going to write a book and then not use it in his own classes.

In my own conceptual physics class (a.k.a. Physics for Poets), I actually use my own (free) book, but I also require them to read a nonfree text by Hewitt, for exactly the reason you're talking about. It would be nice if there was another free text at this level, so I wouldn't have to cost them the money.

... which is often the way it makes sense to someone who has known the subject for 30 years, and not always suitable to a newbie.
It seems like you're saying that books that get used by their own authors aren't as good as books that don't get used by their own authors. But all college textbooks get used by their own authors. There are good books and bad books. You're just describing a bad book.

The really serious issue with professors using their own books is that it's a heinous conflict of interest when the book is only available at an exploitative price, and the professor can force the students to line his pockets. Free books are a good solution to that problem.

Bookmark Story

[superpulpsicle]

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.

Slashdot Posting of the same subject

[jtwJGuevara]

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

real analysis

[TedCheshireAcad]

What about calculus from a real analysis approach? That's the best way to get a solid grasp on how it all works (imho).

Re:real analysis

[triptych]

Try Interactive Real Analysis

Hell hath no place in American primary

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hell hath no place in American primary

[gcaseye6677]

Honestly, I do not have a problem with this. The purpose of a textbook is to instruct a wide range of readers on a particular topic, not to provide an outlet for the author's free expression. I would certainly not be in favor of this type of standard for literary works, or for that matter in an English text which features reprints of actual stories, but for something that is strictly technical, the author's intentional and unintentional personal biases need to be removed. Textbooks are published to instruct, not for the author to make a statement.

Re:Hell hath no place in American primary

[johnnyb]

"The purpose of a textbook is to instruct a wide range of readers on a particular topic, not to provide an outlet for the author's free expression"

However, when an author exercises their free expression you learn more. There's several reasons:

1) the author is communicating in a tone that is more natural both for him and for his audience

2) the student can see some more of the thinking and philosophy behind the subject.

3) sharing free expression is the same as sharing passion. public schools definitely need more passion in learning, and if that can come from textbook authors, great!

Honestly, dry, technical knowledge doesn't help hardly anyone.

One of the biggest misconceptions today is that philosophy is an add-on. Actually, it underlies everything. If you think that you _can_ remove biases from writing, you have fallen into what I call "The Secular Humanist Trap", which is that the phrase "removal of bias" is really a codephrase for "the insertion of a secular humanist bias" in modern society, even by those who know nothing about secular humanism.

reviewer

[happyfrogcow]

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...

Re:reviewer

[happyfrogcow]

is it this Ben Cowell, from http://commoncontent.org/user/14


Name: Ben Crowell
Bio: I teach physics and astronomy at Fullerton College, a community college in southern California. I come fully equipped with a PhD in physics from Yale, but I more fondly remember my undergraduate years at UC Berkeley. On the rare occasions when I'm away from my Linux box, I like to play jazz saxophone.

Re:reviewer

[krysith]

I strongly suspect it is. I have corresponded with Dr. Crowell on the subject of open source/free textbooks before, and I must say that he is the most visible proponent of free textbooks around today. He has written his own free physics textbook, so he walks the walk as well as talking the talk.

10 years from now we might be looking at Dr. Crowell as the 'Linus of textbooks'.

Please check out the Wikibooks site (cited above in another post) if you are interested in contributing to the movement.

Re:reviewer

[Anonymous Coward]

It sure is that Ben Crowell. He publishes Light and Matter on his website as a free Physics text, and also maintains an excellent list of links and reviews of free, in various ways, books. Check www.lightandmatter.com, and you can find his stuff. It is also linked elsewhere in these comments.

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

[Anonymous Coward]

f(x)=x

Re:*** SPOILER WARNING ***

[Nasarius]

I thought the real plot twist was when you found out that f'(x) = dx

Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[cardshark2001]

I took Latin in college, which was a mistake, but that's not what this post is about.

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.

Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[CRCulver]

Latin grammar remains the same, but the method for teaching it in many American universities changes very quickly. American Latin teaching is very suceptive to fads, the majority of which turn out to be very effective and often negatively impact the education students involved. The method presented in the latest edition is wildly different than Wheelock's original method of the 50's.

If you don't like paying for a grammar, and can deal with the rote-learning method of a century ago, check out Textkit, a project which offers PDFs of some of the most respected Latin and Greek textbooks and readers which have now fallen into public domain. The Greek composition book and the selections from the Septuagint are superb.

Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[capt.Hij]

The problem is that english changes. Since the book uses english to describe the latin the descriptions have to be changed and updated. You wouldn't expect to use a book based on 1700's english even though latin hasn't changed since then.

Also, our understanding of how people learn is changing. If there is a better way to describe something then it should be incorporated in the book. The features in sendmail don't change but new versions are released because the authors find better ways to do things.

Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[Xoro]

Funny you should mention that.

I just discovered this nifty site, which serves up free old Latin and Greek grammars and readers and a discussion forum where self-studiers can help each other out.

The teaching methods are ancient, but Latin and Greek are the original Grammar Nazi languages anyway, so that's part of the fun. Of course you're stuck with what the college assigns, but if you want a supplement, the Benjamin D'Ooge book they have on the site is pretty cool.

Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[An Onerous Coward]

It's a problem, all right. But imagine how much worse it is for some urban calculus class which has to save money by using the same book for five years or so. How does the teacher go about finding replacement books when our fellow urban geeks get their books flushed down the toilet? Sorry, that edition isn't being printed anymore.

Unfortunately, none of the options are good. Share books? Upgrade the entire class to the next edition? Spend ten minutes each day trying to reconcile the two? Scour eBay? Let the photocopier do its copyright-infringing thing?

For the people who can afford to live with the textbook scam, it's only an irritation. But for those who can't, it's a major setback to the process of education. And the last thing an already poor person needs is another setback.

I think that educational materials shouldn't be subject to the same market forces as other goods. Of course, they take physical and creative effort to make and distribute. But their purpose is to teach people how to do stuff that they couldn't do before. So the more they're used, the better our society as a whole becomes. Every barrier we can lower that stands between a person and an education, we should lower.

If something is necessary for learning, it should be as free, as convenient, and as high quality as we can make it.

To the naysayers, don't feel sorry if the entire copyright-based textbook publishing system* is decimated. If it does happen--which is probably unlikely--then it will be because free books are serving all the same functions that the old publishing system did, and the old publishers never figured out how to provide anything new. So there wouldn't be any loss.

* Obviously, there will still be a need for physical printing and binding. When I say "copyright-based," I mean that you can only get Book X from Publisher Y because nobody else has the right to print it.

With a free book, many publishers could get in on the act. One could provide a quality product in glossy color for $45, and another could provide a big stack-o-xeroxed-pages for $15. People could choose whatever level of quality best suited their needs. Capitalism at its finest.

Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[thisissilly]

You wouldn't expect to use a book based on 1700's english even though latin hasn't changed since then.

Funny, I had no problems reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, even though it was written in the late 1700s. English hasn't changed that much. I think a Latin textbook from 1800-1922 would be perfectly acceptable, assuming it was a decent textbook to start with.

Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[kubrick]

Now, when was the last time Latin grammar changed? About 1900 years ago?

I'm pretty sure the Vatican updates its official dictionary each year, adding in the words for things like "microwave oven" and "Viagra". Grammatical structure... well, Medieval Latin was quite different to the Latin of 2000 years ago, and I think the vulgar (spoken) variety would have been changing pretty quickly during the first 500 years or so AD, given the number of conquests, conversions, invasions by barbarians, etc.

(I understand and agree with your point, but of course I'm being pedantic... something you're probably used to seeing with scholars of dead languages :)

Re:Wheelock's Latin Grammar

[johnnyb]

I'm doing that with my books. O'Reilly does that for some of theirs, as well as other publishers. It really doesn't have that big of an impact on sales - it may even help them, in the same way that libraries help sales.

More useful than you think

[gravityZ]

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.

Re:More useful than you think

[00420]

I would have killed for a slashdot story like this 3 or 4 years ago when I was making my calc requirements.

This story couldn't have been any better timing for me. I just sold my calc book back to my school because I was short on cash. It wasn't a very good calc book in the first place, but I was dissapointed to get rid of it anyways. Now, I not only know of some free ones, but I've got some reviews to help me know where to start. :)

Re:More useful than you think

[nolife]

I just sold my calc book back to my school because I was short on cash.

Selling your books is very short sighted. You need to be thinking more of a long term stategy like giving blood and eating Raman noodles. ;)

Re:More useful than you think

[larkost]

I would agree with you if we were talking about Dynamics (the Engineering course), Thermo-Fluids, Russian History, or LinAlg. There are lots of points that you are going to miss the first time through, and it is nice to go back to them.

But basic Calculus? You are either going to learn it the first time, and keep using it in further classes, or you are going to forget about it as you go through all of your other classes, never using it again in your life. I am not advocating against everyone learning Calculus as a basic concept (even if they never use it again as such)... but if you are going to keep textbooks this is not the one...

Re:More useful than you think

[surreal-maitland]

it's absolutely useful. the reviewer fails to mention, however, how limited the open courseware program is.

sad as it is (and slightly off-topic), the open courseware program is essentially a publicity stunt for MIT. most of the online courses lack complete references, let along complete lecture notes or useful guidance. nor is this a priority for MIT. OCW has gotten nothing but positive publicity, so MIT feels no need to better the program. sure, it's better than nothing, but it's a major stretch to call it courseware.

thank heavens someone is putting up useful online resources. and thank goodness someone is giving us an idea of what the are!

Re:More useful than you think

[MicktheMech]

While I agree that few people will ever go back to remember how to find a derivative, those calc books often have very useful tables of Trig identities and formulas for integrating certain functions. You may be a human computer, but I sometimes need to go back and check.

Re:More useful than you think

[Drantin]

Raman noodles... would they come in a long cylindrical spacecraft populated by spider-like things and alien avians?

or perhaps you meant ramen?

Re:More useful than you think

[Surt]

Just a data point:

I have never needed to go back and check something in a situation where I had access to my old calc book, but did not have access to the web. Many times I have had access to the web but not the calc book.

The web has in every instance answered my lookup need correctly, and typically in less time than it would take to get from the calc book.

I wish I had sold my calc book when I could. I'll be throwing it away (no, no one in my area accepts old textbook donations, i've already checked) next year when I have to move so I don't have to pay to move it.

Re:More useful than you think

[myov]

Exactly... would really have been useful back when I was taking Calc II.

In another course (stats), I found really useful notes on the chemical engineering web site at another university. We're not the only ones talking these courses - look around!

Re:More useful than you think

[Dashing Leech]

...those calc books often have very useful tables of Trig identities and formulas for integrating certain functions

For that I suggest just getting a standard handbook, like the CRC one. I use it almost daily.

Re:More useful than you think

[Seahawk91]

I found MIT's Linear Algebra quite useful when I was taking a similar class from a Prof nicknamed "The Cobra." I believe he could erase faster than he wrote or talked. He always answered a question exactly how he previously explained it, but in a louder voice. Naturally, he selected a book with recursive examples (page 1...perform these three steps, page 7...refer to page 1 example and perform these two additional steps, etc.) I think I lost it before the first 200 pages. I did a web search and found Dr. Strang's class in real media and watched every bit. I did not get an A (or B)in the class, but I was failing before watching the vids and passed the class in the end.

This was before the whole OCW thing started and may have been one of their test cases to show how good online learning can be. Anyway, it worked for me.

Re:More useful than you think

[shlong]

Selling your books is very short sighted. You need to be thinking more of a long term stategy like giving blood and eating Raman noodles. ;)

Ah, but one must first come up with bus fare in order to get to the blood bank.

Re:More useful than you think

[tabdelgawad]

I don't think this is a fair assessment of OCW. Some professors follow textbooks fairly closely and are unlikely to have extensive notes on the material. Other professors like to do their own thing and offer notes that are almost as comprehensive as textbooks.

In fact, just today I needed to look up some introductory finance concepts (diversification, CAPM) and didn't have a textbook handy. After searching fruitlessly on Google, I remembered OCW and found two excellent sets of notes from Sloan courses. Unlike other schools I know which keep even their crappy powerpoint slides under lock and key (username/password), MIT's offerings are nothing to scoff at.

What is Calculus for?

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

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)

Re:What is Calculus for?

[gregarican]

I'm not sure why this was modded down. I tend to agree. Just recently I started self-paced learning on topics that I'd been poor at in the past. Higher mathematics is a perfect example. I was thinking about it the other day and couldn't come up with what math --- other than the four basic functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and maybe really basic algebra --- being an average adult requires. That's why my college Calculus learning is totally lost now when I look at this subject as a 35-year-old.

What's other folks' takes on this? Other subjects like Literature, History, etc. tend to have stuck with me more for sure.

Re:What is Calculus for?

[ckaminski]

Not calculus, per se, but statistics. I've had need of higher math at least 6 times the past year, and it all stems from my brain not knowing how to create an equation able to solve my problem (silly things like how many gumballs in a car going 60mph, they hit a wall, how long does it take the gumballs at the back of the car to stop decellerating type of things)... which probably don't need calculus, but all my math skillz are lost to the depths of time and having used my math book as a pillow...

Re:What is Calculus for?

[Professr3]

Without second-order differential equations to solve the spring-damper equations, your car would not have decent shock absorbers...

Re:What is Calculus for?

[Quill_28]

You can't use what you don't know.

Re:What is Calculus for?

[drgonzo59]

I would tend to disagree. It is rather a fault of the professors who taught Calc to fail to point out the practical uses of it, or at least the possible uses of it.

I never liked math much. I could figure it out, but physics, chemistry, comp. sci were more related to the world we live in. It was later in college when I had the painful realization that without math all those disciplines (and most others) are meaningless. I regret I had not put more effort into it then, that would have made my life much easier now. For example I took a Linear Algebra course in soph. year and after the exam week I had forgotten what an eigenvector was. It would have been nice for the prof. to point out the importance and the uses of it. Now I take a Quantum Computing course and I had to go back to the 4 year old dusty Linear Algebra notes for a review.

Re:What is Calculus for?

[gregarican]

Certainly higher math has its cross-disciplinary place. Other science and technology fields for sure. But note that I was speculating about the "average adult." I think that other fields like Literature, History, etc. all are more applicable in everyday life for an average adult. In a practical/functional sense what other than +, -, *, /, and perhaps introductory algebra does an average adult need to know to get by?

Re:What is Calculus for?

[gregarican]

I see the light. This is all very true. The tedium of most of these studies get lost in practical everyday applications. It's more about being a well-rounded person who doesn't embarass him/herself playing Jeopardy I suppose.

The concept about critical, logical, analytical thinking makes sense.

Re:What is Calculus for?

[SocietyoftheFist]

If you really know you algebra and trig you'll have no problem with Calculus. Calculus is just a set of computational rules based around the rates of change. Most of the engineering feats you see around you require a thorough understanding of higher math and physics. It may not be usefull to you directly but it is useful for the creation of many of the things that you may use in everyday life.

Re:What is Calculus for?

[Quill_28]

>If you really know you algebra and trig you'll have no problem with Calculus.

I would agree except the algebra is more important than the trig.

I think I learned more algebra in calc than I did in all my other classes combined. Algebra was also the hardest thing about calc in my opinion.

Re:What is Calculus for?

[DingoBueno]

I would agree except the algebra is more important than the trig.

Absolutely. For the most part, you can open a book and look up the trig identities needed to solve problems. You'll never get a chart that'll tell you how to do algebra. That comes with practice. I was never allowed to use a reference during calc tests, which is a shame because I didn't get a C because I didn't know calc, it was because of arctan.

EE students

[jaxdahl]

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.

Re:EE students

[kisielk]

Honestly I wasn't too impressed with this book. While I commend the author for providing a free resource for students of electronics, I found that he didn't go in to enough depth with most of the topics. The book is good for a quick introduction to various topics, but I don't think it's very suitable as a textbook for example, due to its lack of detail.

PDF Format?

[vasqzr]

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 Free Calc Book Is Better!

[Mordack]

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.

Exactly.

[bad enema]

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.

Re:Exactly.

[garcia]

yeah, they cause the least amount of confusion because they are already explained in the examples.

I am sorry, but at the Calc level I am unable to extrapolate the knowledge gained by 4 examples to cover 15 different problems.

It's been an issue with EVERY single Calc book I have seen (6 or 7 IIRC). Math books made for students by math professors. Really doesn't work too well.

Re:Exactly.

[Breakfast Pants]

Well let me know how your math book made by a tap dancing professor turns out. I'll be waiting.

Re:Exactly.

[bad enema]

Math professors have their Ph.D's, so they must all be smart guys. The type of guys who must have slept during class in first year while everyone else was panicking about not keeping up with the lecture material. They type of guys who just can't relate to the learning demands of the average student because they're too smart.

A math professor with a psychology minor, maybe. I'd rather see TA's have their input into the books that their profs write - they have a better understanding of what kinda issues the students are having problems with.

Re:Exactly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. A group of math professor's writing a math book are unlikely in their early 20s. They are likely well into their 30s and possibly even older. Sure, graduate students may have some minor input but based on my experiences with those that hold PhD's any sort of negative vibe they might get against their beliefs does not go over well.

So, a 30+ PhD (a master in their subject matter mind you) is going to teach me (a master of nothing) math? Remember, I don't have the mental capacity for math that they do and they expect things of me that shouldn't be expected.

Re:Exactly.

[DarcSeed]

This is exactly the kind of crap I'm going through right now in my computability theory class (its not calculus, but its a ton of math and logic), and it was the same with all the other math related advanced level courses. The material is hard enough as it is, I don't need teachers making it even harder..

I mean, I know they know the material backside down, but that is not grounds for assuming they know *how to teach it*. Knowing something and knowing how to teach it are two different stories, and unfortunately, most phd professors just don't care about the second part....

As far as examples go, they love sticking with the easy examples that everyone understands, but when it comes to homework and test time, they also love jacking the difficulty up a bazillion notches just to see if you can figure it out on your own.

Re:Exactly.

[TopherC]

If you need 15 examples in order to solve 15 problems on some general topic, I might suggest that you haven't learned anything.

If solving a problem becomes a monkey-see, monkey-do type of excersize where you've been trained to use specific techniques on certain homework problems, then the student is practicing a technique but not understanding the subject. If the homework problems make the student think a bit and extend those "examples" in new ways, then they might be learning. Hopefully calc students expect that at the end of the course they can solve real-world problems that haven't been solved before, and apply the tools of calculus in ways that they haven't been explicitly taught. If they can't, then the entire course was a waste of time.

A good professor should be able to help any student gain this kind of working understanding of their subject, provided the student is also willing to work as hard as necessary. But there are a lot of professors out there that aren't that good. Since students don't often have much choice in the matter, they might have to look for help elsewhere.

Another problem is that students who have spent more time rehearsing techniques (recipies) and less time actually learning math tend to do better on timed, standardized tests. So to some extent the system punishes good students and teachers.

Re:Exactly.

[BorgCopyeditor]

A math professor with a psychology minor, maybe.

Or, heaven forfend, a math professor who has some expertise in writing?! The humanities have at least some benefits even outside of academia.

Democratize publishing

[droo0g]

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.

Re:Democratize publishing

[dillon_rinker]

Democratic? Really? You mean it's ruled by the people? Last time I checked there was no sort of voting process. Perhaps you mean that people vote by buying? If that were democracy, we could legalize bribery.

I suspect that what the author meant was "Lowering the economic barrier to publishing for a wide audience."

Re:Democratize publishing

[An Onerous Coward]

Of course, you didn't actually read any of the books. It's hard to tell if you even read the reviews. When a college physics/astronomy teacher says "I wish I'd learned Calculus from this book," that's pretty high praise.

Publishing books doesn't need to be expensive. The physical printing and binding of a thousand page textbook should be around $15. That's a service that many, many businesses are equipped to provide.

Nor does it matter how many free textbooks there are with crapp formatting, no illustrations, and a haphazard and clumsy teaching style there are. The reason is, there only needs to be one quality book. The also-rans will fall by the wayside. The "vehicle to reach a wide audience" exists.

I keep hearing that "the community" will never be able to match the sort of quality that for-pay textbooks provide, and that it is foolish to try. I'm convinced that they can, and that there will be a big push towards this kind of textbook within the next few year.

But I would also guess that there are some poorer school districts out there who would be grateful for even the worst of these books--right now--if they were only aware of their existence.

Re:Democratize publishing

[Tassach]

the average profit margin for a text books is about %35

If textbook publishers are only turning a 35% profit on their books, they're either mismanaged as hell or they're playing accounting games to hide the real profits. Even assuming 100% markup by the bookstore, the publisher is still getting $50 for every $100 textbook sold; if they can't find more than $17.50 profit out of that then something smells fishy.

Re:Democratize publishing

[droo0g]

Well, I did read the reviews, not the books, neither did you. Publishing books is expensive largely due to the cost of paper. When you say that publishing a thousand page book should cost about $15, it's a silly statement. It's like saying that a car can be produced for $500, could it be done? probably. would you want to drive it? no way. The economics of publishing are very complex and the factors that go into unit cost vary wildly (paper, print run size, color, binding type, etc.) And it's not a service that many, many businesses can provide. If it were printing companies like RR Donnelley would not be so huge and profitibale.

Re:Democratize publishing

[droo0g]

mismanaged as hell

Re:Democratize publishing

[An Onerous Coward]

I notice that you focus in on my (admittedly guesstimated) statistic, while completely ignoring the major points I was trying to make.

Dude, I could print and "bind" a thousand page book for $15 (BYOBinder). Give me the PDF, I'll provide the paper. Toner is going to be the biggest cost. Any small business with a really good laser printer could probably do it for $10, no strings, no frills.

The argument that the results wouldn't be as good as current publishers can provide is of only marginal relevance. If you'd rather spoil yourself and buy the $40 book instead, there will be some printer out there who will be happy to meet you at that price point.

But that's not going to happen until open books are seen as a viable alternative, and "reprinting" is seen as a viable business model. Reciting an unjustified, kneejerk mantra of "open books will always be crap, and the publishers are actually doing you a favor by charging $120 for a calculus book that will become 'obsolete' within eighteen months" isn't helping to accomplish that.

Re:Democratize publishing

[droo0g]

and who pays the author for his work? Cause your an honest guy, you won't email the PDF to 85 of your best friends, will you?

Re:Democratize publishing

[bcrowell]

(grandparent post): the average profit margin for a text books is about %35
This is a reasonable ballpark figure for the markup on a college textbook. My school's store, for instance, has a markup of 27%. The school sets that figure, and the (nonprofit) bookstore basically breaks even on that after paying rent and labor.

It would be fairly meaningless to give an average profit margin for a textbook, because there's so much variation. In other markets (e.g., novels), I know that the majority of books actually lose small amounts of money, but the publishers stay in the black due to the small minority of books that sell well.

(parent post): Even assuming 100% markup by the bookstore, the publisher is still getting $50 for every $100 textbook sold; if they can't find more than $17.50 profit out of that then something smells fishy.
No way. No bookstore has a 100% markup. If you're paying $100 for a college textbook, the wholesale price is about $70. Yes, there is a lot of room for profit on the publisher's end. But do keep in mind that paper, printing, and binding are not the main cost. The main costs are editorial work and advertising. It's like Coke and Pepsi. The cost to produce a can of Coke is essentially zero. What makes it expensive in the store is advertising.

DO NOT SLASHDOT AARON

[Ann Coulter]

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.

Re:DO NOT SLASHDOT AARON

[i_r_sensitive]

Just an FYI...

Posting on slashdot with the title "DO NOT SLASHDOT..." is oxymoron in action...

Damn 2 minute limit, what if I'm only funny two minutes at a time?

"source code ... isn't available..."

[CresentCityRon]

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.

Re:"source code ... isn't available..."

[drinkypoo]

HTML, PDF and so on are computer-readable. A hardcopy is not. (Since OCR introduces errors.) It should probably be amended to read "digital computer readable source".

Re:"source code ... isn't available..."

[sloptaco]

also, pdf's and ps's are like binaries. LaTeX source code helps as a learning tool for people interested in mathematical typesetting. Not making this avaible would indeed be a gross violation of the GPL.

Calculus textbooks should not be free!

[i_r_sensitive]

Think of it as a confirmation dialog. When you get to the counter and the pimple faced clerk says, "Three hundred and eighteen dollars." you should hear:

"You are about to install Calculus 251. This courseware has been certified by (INSERT_NAME) University. Installing some courseware could be hazardous to your brain. Your parents deny all responsibility for the consequences should you install third party courseware. Continue with the installation of Calculus 251?"

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...

Shameless plug...

[samhalliday]

FHSST

what is source? when is it open?

[buzban]

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... ;)

Re:what is source? when is it open?

[p3tersen]

It's a finer line in the case of a math book though since the 'raw' text is written in a markup language called LaTeX that is essentally a programming language. You can write functions, scripts with if-then switches, etc. It's an intriguing question!

Library of Alexandria

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Library of Alexandria

[drinkypoo]

On the other hand, things regularly drop off of the internet, and not all of them are indexed before this happens. Thus it's as if the library of Alexandria were perpetually on fire, and books which no one made a high enough priority didn't get moved out of the way in time and got burned, as new wings are added onto the library and books are either moved into them to escape the blaze, or new books are inserted into them.

Great review

[p3tersen]

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?

CHEAPER AT AMAZON.COM!

[Chuck Bucket]

...uhhh...wait...forget it.

CBV

A major missing niche in online publishing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A major missing niche in online publishing...

[akrowne]

> Perhaps PlanetMath will become more organized and complete. I've thought about contributing to PlanetMath, but I don't feel completely comfortable with it.

Thanks for mentioning PlanetMath.

Can you talk a little bit more about why you wouldn't feel comfortable contributing? You represent a contingent I haven't really heard from, so I'm very curious as to your reasons.

Also, in what way would you say its not organized? Are you aware that all entries are filed both alphabetically and in the MSC categorical system?

Cheers,

Aaron

Re:A major missing niche in online publishing...

[tootlemonde]

Based on my experience as a programmer in the business environment, statistics is by far the most useful math skill to have after algebra unless the programmer is in a scientific environment.

Businesses now have huge amounts of numerical data available. The analysis and graphic display of the data gives one a competitive advantage over one's colleagues who may be better/more experienced programmers.

Writing programs to analyze large data sets is a natural progression from writing programs to manage large data sets. Even doing conventional things like analyzing log files benefit from statistical methods.

Programmers who want to upgrade their skills might better look to statistics rather than another programming platform. You can carve out a niche in the company as part programmer, part business analyst.

Re:A major missing niche in online publishing...

[cavemanf16]

isixsigma.com - May or may not help you in your quest for statistics knowledge, but it's a business resource for those of us budding stats dude's working on getting managers to accept statistical variability in their processes. What my coworkers and I have been lacking is a good "sample size calculator" that works in reverse - i.e. you plug in what percent error you want and the sample size, tell the calculator what you want the confidence interval to be, and out pops the needed population size to achieve such results.

Re:A major missing niche in online publishing...

[akrowne]

Hi,

I'm sorry if I appeared defensive. I know PlanetMath has many shortcomings (perhaps better than anyone else) and am genuinely interested in finding out how to make it better.

You are right, PlanetMath is particularly lacking in statistics entries. And yes, more entries need diagrams, and in general, entries need to be more extensive. We're getting better, though. And there are plenty of examples of entries that are better on PlanetMath than MathWorld =)

As to the ownership process, you can actually set all your entries as world-editable, a-la Wiki, with PlanetMath's ACL system. I know I have done a poor job advertising this, and it should be a basic preference asked of users when they first sign up. For details see this documentation.

You also raise the objection of not liking how PlanetMath entries are "decomposed" (i.e., main entry, then proof, example, result, etc). This does not have to be the case--- people can just write one monolithic entry and put as much as they want in it. But it turns out that it is rare that someone has enough time to do this, and people are more productive when they can create and manage their own small, well-defined piece of content. It lowers the barrier to contribution, which is very important for a 100% volunteer effort. And in fact, it is potentially "invisible"--- in the future, it could be a preference to simply view all attachments as concatenated with the main entry.

I understand that you don't have much time, and honestly, I don't expect this of anyone who is competent. But someone like you could help PlanetMath out a lot simply by filing corrections (like "this needs a diagram"!). Most authors are very good about integrating suggestions this way. This is a consequence of the ownership system that you may not have anticipated.

As for the name, PlanetMath was started when MathWorld was offline for a year, so its not exactly like there was any competition for this "motif". Oh well!

Thanks again for taking the time to talk to me.

Sometimes it is worth it.

[DenOfEarth]

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.

Re:Sometimes it is worth it.

[SkunkPussy]

> perhaps by judging reviews on Amazon or whatever

I've had bad experiences with the reviews on amazon. basically its not in amazons interest to have too many reviews slating a book. they're better off printing positive reviews about everything.

I would be interested to hear counterexamples.

Re:Sometimes it is worth it.

[DenOfEarth]

Hence the 'whatever'.

Re:Sometimes it is worth it.

[Carmody]

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

There is more "material" then would ever be covered in a first year calculus course. What has changed in the past hundred years (actually even in the past FIVE years) is the relative importance of various topics to various populations.

If, for example, applications involving slope fields started to grow in importance, it would start being emphasized more in first year calculus.

In addition, available technology does affect things. I don't want to open that whole can of worms now, but I'm sure you will agree that, for example, extracting square roots by hand is less important now than it used to be. Similary, there are things in calculus that are still important, but less so now that a graphing-calculator is less than $80.

Furthermore, student populations and majors are different. It used to be that only engineers and mathematicians took calculus, so all books were written towards that audience. (actually, earlier than that, everyone took calculus. The first elective in History was at Harvard, where students were allowed to "elect" out of calculus to take... Hebrew) So now there are calc books aimed at people in the chemistry and biology fields, etc.

Re:Sometimes it is worth it.

[DenOfEarth]

Yes, I can see your point. Although, since my experience is obviously towards the scientific and engineering kind of field, then that's what I'm speaking towards. However, when we are talking Calculus, a derivative is a derivative, no matter what field you are in, there are only so many different ways to present the multiplication rule (I forget if that's what it's called), and they won't change too much, as it is still the same relatively basic concept.

When you get into higher levels of calculus, then of course the texts will become more specialized, but for the basic stuff, there isn't too much variation. One more thing, if you are teaching a course in Calculus, and let people solve certain problems using a graphing calculator, you aren't really teaching them calculus, are you?

Re:Sometimes it is worth it.

[Carmody]

a derivative is a derivative, no matter what field you are in

Yes and no.

If you are a pure mathematician, a derivative involves taking the limit of a difference quotient. The shortcuts (x^2 goes to 2x) are not really relevant.

If you are an engineer, you probably have already forgotten how to take the limit of a difference quotient, and you probably don't even care.

If you are a scientist, a "function" is probably not an algebraic rule, but a table of data, and a derivative is the slope between two data points.

If you are an economist or business type, a "function" is given by a graph more often than an equation, and the derivative graph is related to the graph of the function. (concave up functions have increasing derivatives, etc.)

The older calculus books tended to be purely algebraic. A student could go through the course, thinking they know calculus, and be unable to draw the graph of the derivative of a function unless they had the explicit formula. As an engineer, you know that you don't always (often?) have explicit formulas for functions - sometimes you are lucky to even have a graph.

The even older calculus books didn't even go that far - half the book was about rigorous epsilon-delta limit proofs, and then the theoretical derivative. Actually computing the derivative of x^2 was an afterthought.

The even even older calculus books did limits a different way, using differentials and introducing the "surreal" or "hyperreal" numbers, involving the "dx" as a quantity unto itself.

These changes are based on who is taking calculus, which has changed. The purpose of the course has changed as well. And there were political pressures - engineering departments were so disgusted with the "we are teaching mostly to benefit math majors" calc course that they started threatening to teach their own calc course for their own majors.

There is a lot of variation. Right behind me is a bookshelf filled with current calc books. Some are similar, and some are very different. The subject "calculus" is broad enough that there is a great deal of variety in what should be included, what should be emphasized, etc.

One more thing, if you are teaching a course in Calculus, and let people solve certain problems using a graphing calculator, you aren't really teaching them calculus, are you?

Depends on who you ask. Hence the need for a variety of books, depending on the instructor's answer to that very question.

I certainly take your point. The counter-point is "Would you teach a class in carpentry without allowing your students ever to pick up an actual hammer and do what real carpenters do with their tools?"

I'm not telling you my take on it, but I'm trying to illustrate why there are so many calculus books, with so many editions. (a teacher who is heavy into the use of technology isn't going to want a textbook that ignores the existence of calculators like the TI-92, for example)

'Calculus Made Easy' still a great book

[anandamide]

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

GPL Abuse

[One Louder]

This article brings up an interesting issue with the GPL - many people think GPL=="Open Source" or GPL=='No Cost" and automatically use the license even in things for which it makes no sense.

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.

Re:GPL Abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The GPL is a very clear, very simple license. It's amazing that somebody would go to all the trouble of creating something, and then slap a license on it without even bothering to read it to make sure it is suitable.

You get what you pay for

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Idarubicin]

he 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.

This reminds my of a story my mother told me. One of her mathematics teachers/professors (I don't remember whether she was in high school or university at the time) was publishing a new textbook. He paid the first student to find each error a quarter--which was actually a useful amount of money in those days. I doubt you could find a more dedicated bunch of proofreaders...

OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[sakusha]

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.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[Sage Gaspar]

I can't speak about other universities, but in my high school, my college, and all of my friend's colleges, no professor has ever taught or referenced Calculus by infinitesimals, to the best of my knowledge.

In addition, I haven't seen any Real Analysis or Diff EQ books built for the person who learned anything other than the standard approach to Calc. As a math major, I'm pretty interested in it and plan on studying it in a little further depth, but I don't know that it's necessarily the best method to teach incoming Calc students.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[S3D]

Infinitesimals suppose to be more "physical" then limits. However they require formidable algebraic foundation and IMHO not easy to work with...and I never heared physics actually use them, in their rigorous form. To start calculus from infinitesimals is about as difficalt as start arifmetics form axiomatic set theory....

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[drinkypoo]

I think the real problem is that your professor was a dick. Personally, I'd have been in the department dean's office the day after I got that F on the test, and if he didn't help me, the dean of instruction, the vice president of instruction, the president of instruction... You can see where I'm going with this. There's no reason to let a fucked up professor shit on you like that.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[sakusha]

I think you're right, studying from Kiesler made me constantly feel like I was a moron at algebra, which was pretty ridiculous because I was Honors Math and presumably had a better grounding in algebra than other students. Of course, it's hard to recall the specifics since this was almost 30 years ago and I have little memory left from that course, except for the bitter aftertaste.
But fortunately, this Infinitesimals method was a short-lived experiment, AFAIK my university dropped it after only a couple of years, I heard that the Infinitesimals students had troubles meshing with the other students in 2nd year calc classes. I wouldn't know about that, I never made it that far.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[sakusha]

This whole course went down in flames, not just my final. I did negotiate with the dean, that's how I got the D+. I considered my grades a reflection of the instructor's performance, not my own performance. The instructor deserved an F, not me.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[sakusha]

The obvious problem is that advanced physics has little application to freshman calculus courses.

Physicists are weird about math anyway, I still remember a quote from a famous physicist (I can't remember his name but you'd recognize him) speaking about math, "if mathematics accurately describes reality, it ceases to be interesting."

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[Colazar]

I wonder if the reverse is true.

I was an honors math student who flamed out on the math/engineering track in college because calculus made NO FREAKING SENSE. I worked very hard, and in the beginning classes I could often get the right answers from analogy to the practice problems, but I could never figure out *why* anything worked, which eventually killed me.

So perhaps I'll check this out, I guess the worst that could happen is that I could not understand calculus, in another form.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[sakusha]

This calculus course made no freaking sense due to several problems:

1. The textbook was full of errors, we spent 1/3 of the course proofreading it.
2. The instructor didn't understand the material fully, and had trouble explaining it. Our course was the first attempt at teaching infinitesimal calculus.
3. The text spent too much time explaining WHY things worked the way they did, rather than spending time explaining HOW to APPLY calculus to problems.

As another commenter alluded to, I don't need to know set theory in order to add 2+2, although once I DID learn some set theory, I finally knew WHY the answer is 4. To this day, I still understand much of the WHY of calculus, but not any of the HOW.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[Bob Hearn]

Wow, I'm really disappointed to see all the negative opinion's on Keisler's book, and the infinitesimal approach to calculus.

I happened to run across the book on Keisler's site a couple of months ago, and... I read the whole pdf through virtually non-stop. All 913 pages. This is by far the best introduction to calculus I've ever seen - very intuitive and clean.

Those of you arguing for the conventional, limits-based approach vs. the "nonstandard", infinitesimal-based approach are missing the point that the very notation in standard use for calculus (dy/dx etc.) really makes no sense without a notion of infinitesimal. Originally Newton developed calculus in terms of limits, while Leibniz used infinitesimals. Leibniz's notation won out over Newton's, because it accords with the way mathematicians intuitively think about calculus. Neither approach was on a sound mathematical footing until the limits-based approach was formalized in the 1870's. The infinitesimal-based approach was only formalized in 1960, by Robinson - the mathematical tools needed to do so were not available in the 19th century. Due to an historical accident Robinson's approach is called "nonstandard analysis", but the implication that there is anything deficient or deviant about it does not follow. (BTW, in addition to infinitesimals, the hyperreals (or "nonstandard numbers") also include infinite numbers.)

With this approach, developed in Keisler's book, not only is the notation in accord with the model, but many results are much more straightforward to understand and to prove. No more long, tedious epsilon-delta arguments. Really, the only thing complicated about using nonstandard numbers for calculus is the formal development of the hyperreals - and in this book that is relegated to a brief treatment in an appendix. It's easy enough to state and use the properties of the hyperreals without having to go through their formal mathematical construction.

I find it disheartening that the book was allowed to go out of print, and that there are now no (as far as I'm aware) current popular calculus texts using the infinitesimal-based approach. I, like the original poster, and like most students learning today, was always confused by what you could and couldn't do with dy and dx. How I wish I'd had this book 20 years ago.

The upside is that the book is now freely available on the author's site! Go get it!

Bob Hearn

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[sakusha]

The only positive remarks I've read here are coming from people who already learned calc using the standard methods, and found the book much later, declaring it logical and informative. So how would you know if it is appropriate for beginning calc students? I assure you it was a disaster, and was dropped for very good reasons. I dunno, maybe our instructor was exceptionally cruel or an exceptionally bad teacher, I have no way to compare, just as you have no way to compare what it would be like if you'd learned from Kiesler in your freshman calc class. YMMV.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[Bob Hearn]

Well, fair enough. But you did way that the book was still being debugged when you were using it, and that the instructor didn't do a great job of teaching it.

So we need to find someone who used the book when it was finished, with a competent instructor.

Anybody??

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[sakusha]

Might be hard to find one, since the Infinitesimal Calc method of instruction was a fairly short-lived experiment that ended in the '80s, and anyone who got through it would have decades-old memories. I too would like to hear of anyone who got through the book successfully. I have a feeling the only ones were the author's own students.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[bodius]

I would tend to agree that learning calculus from Kiesler would be rather impractical these days. The methods used in Kiesler are from Nonstandard Analysis, which is aptly named because they are quite "nonstandard." Most mathematicians, AFAIK, are not trained in this at all.

Almost everyone learns the epsilon-delta limit approach to calculus. This is probably due to historical reasons, as it was the first way to put calculus on a rigorous footing. Nonstandard Analysis came later, and although it was more intuitive people didn't pick up on it because epsilon-delta provided just as much rigor with a lot more familiarity.

I would not knock on the methods of Nonstandard Analysis entirely, however. It provides a much more intuitive way to understanding calculus. In fact, the calculus of Newton and Leibniz was much more similar to the methods of nonstandard analysis than what is taught today. I'm not a professional mathematician, but I am aware of the fact that theorems are generally easier and more elegant to prove in nonstandard analysis.

I definitely agree with the reviewer in that what is so great about Kiesler is that by his use of nonstandard analysis, it is able to understand dy and dx much better than in the standard calculus teaching.

As I have experienced, what is most tragic about the teaching of the calculus is that the fundamental ideas of infinity, infinitesimals (or limits), and continuity are not given nearly enough attention. In order to truly understand calculus, these ideas must be understood thoroughly on a conceptual basis. This is possible through epsilon-delta, but it is often considered much too sophisticated for a beginning student of calculus to understand (which is fairly correct; remember that the rigorization of calculus took many, many years of work from the most brilliant mathematicians). Nonstandard analysis can provide the pedagogical bridge for this.

BTW - I forget to mention Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, which is a different way of allowing the use of inifinitesimals in a rigorous manner. It differs from nonstandard analysis in that its development came through category theory versus logic. I believe John L. Bell wrote a wonderful little book on the subject. (Google "infinitesimal analysis john bell" and you can find the book).

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[1iar_parad0x]

Go ahead and try it...

However, I'd recommend you take a look at "Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus P. Thompson

Yes, I'm redundant.

It seems both Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman used this book in their youth. I've seen numerous people reference it. It's the best INTRODUCTORY calculus book there is. Frankly, non-standard analysis is really for logicians.

Re:OMG, I used Kiesler in 1976

[Monkeybaister]

It seems like much of your problems were the professor did not spend any time teaching, more time fixing the book.

I've learned Calculus three different ways. I had originally learned it from the simplification of the usual limit approach (which did not really have any proofs, just "convincing arguments"). Then later I learned the formalization of the Riemann integral and epsilon-delta notation, while at the same time I read this book on nonstandard analysis. I then later took a graduate analysis course, which used the Lebesgue integral on top of measure theory.

Nonstandard analysis has the simplest proofs once you have certain facts about the Hyperreals, the Riemann approach requires tons of epsilon-deltas and definitions of lower and upper limits, while the measure theory approach requires both epsilon-delta and set theory mastery (but lets you do things Riemann can't make sense of).

The Hyperreal approach is elegant in many ways since proofs that are hard using epsilon-deltas become one-line proofs (For instance the proof of the equivalence of Cauchy and convergent sequences is a one line proof in NSA using basic properties of infinitesimals, while it takes two half page theorems in SA). It basically gets all the hard work done in constructing the Hyperreals and then the rest is for free (but many properties and the construction of the Reals are ignored in SA), but it's not a well-accepted way of doing calculus. Which is the biggest point it has against it (I read a paper about using nonstandard analysis in computer proving systems since it only needs statements with one quantifier instead of the usual three).

Given that, I would imagine that it would be a really bad way to learn calculus not because it's a hard approach, but that it's an arcane one.

This is a very heartening thing

[sisukapalli1]

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

How about a F*#%ing English Textbook

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How about a F*#%ing English Textbook

[gregarican]

Actually, economics can be used as a singular or a plural. So the writer doesn't require remedial grammar as you have suggested. Check the dictionary yourself.

Re:How about a F*#%ing English Textbook

[sloptaco]

That's it! Meet me behind the handball court after school! I'm kicking your ass!

-sloptaco

Especially

[bsd4me]

Especially when you consider that the source can have comments in it which would not appear in the output.

I've taken two courses with Paul Garrett

[jhoffoss]

Paul Garrett, the author of the first textbook, is easily the best Math professor I encountered during my time at the University of Minnesota. I took two courses with him: Error Correcting Codes and Cryptology. Both courses used a course packet or textbook written by him. Both books were very good, and fit in with his course material very well. Last I checked, he had all of his course notes freely available, which cover much of what is in the text.

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.

The editions cycle.

[ExtraT]

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.

Creative Commons more suitable

[anymouse]

A Creative Commons license would seem to be a much better approach than trying to use the GPL. They even have a section explicitly for educators. Since SCO hasn't tried to sue MIT yet, most people are probably unaware that it is available.

Re:Creative Commons more suitable

[nick_urbanik]

What is wrong with using the GPL for a book (compared with Creative Commons), apart from offering fewer choices to the user? If you are happy with others making money of the book, I don't see a problem with it. I was surprised to read the statement in the article:

First, the GPL is a software license, and is less suitable as a copyleft license for books than the GFDL or a CC license.

The GFDL places quite a few restrictions on use of a work compared with the GPL. There is also the Open Publication License which seems to be less restrictive than the GFDL.

idealistic

[Anonymous Coward]

You're idealistic.

New Calc books?

[drgonzo59]

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).

Linear Algebra?

[SpaceRook]

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.

Some Professors Care

[lhpineapple]

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.

Open Source K-12 texts can save billions

[ebusinessmedia1]

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.

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_Pr oject

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.

boy, are these guys ever up the shit creek...

[Trailer Trash]

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.

A few points about Wheelock's

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

U.S. Navy Calculus book

[Animats]

I once came across an official "U.S. Navy Calculus" textbook. This was written for use during WWII, when there was an urgent need for engineers. It was utterly practical. Integration methods included the "tables method", looking up the appropriate integral in a table of integrals.

After the war, the theory people took over again, of course.

Re:U.S. Navy Calculus book

[Anonymous Coward]

> It was utterly practical. Integration methods included the "tables method", looking up the appropriate integral in a table of integrals.

Most widely used method today is to type it in your pirated copy of Maple or Mathematica, which is even more practical.

Re:U.S. Navy Calculus book

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Integration methods included the "tables method", looking up the appropriate integral in a table of integrals.

That's what we are tought too. We got a list of basic integrals and a few methodes to make a equation fit one (or more) of these integrals.

true geekdom

[LuxFX]

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 /.

Re:Free as in Beer?

[Bohnanza]

I remember sitting in a bar drinking with my physics professor (OK, I didn't go to a normal school) when he turned to me and said "What is the value of time as the volume of beer approaches zero?" The answer was: "Time to get another beer!"

progress in calculus

[snarkh]

What, you have not heard about the recent groundbreaking discoveries in calculus?

It is amazing how these textbooks manage to keep up.

Google

[Schezar]

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 ;^)

I ended up dropping 85 dollars on it, but

[Mints]

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

My Bus. Computing Text

[bangular]

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.

Re:My Bus. Computing Text

[slimak]

I fail to understand how begin familiar with computers makes it easier to comprehend how to eat a bowl of cereal. But then again, I am not familiar with computers so maybe that is the problem.

In the spirit of all this free publishing...

[StressGuy]

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.

Re:In the spirit of all this free publishing...

[fishbowl]

How about the reggae song to remember the log of the quotient is the difference of the logs?

They should modernize Calculus/Math instruction

[javester]

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 never understood the idea of new calc books...

[Weaselmancer]

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

"Calculus Made Easy" in the public domain

[rjh]

"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.

Garrett, Calc and Crypto

[ry4an]

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.

Calculating PI

[justanyone]

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.

Re:Calculating PI

[valkraider]

I did the same thing. I wrote an application, here is the source:

Pi up to 50,000,000 digits!

It's written an interpreted language called "HTML" and is interpreted via a "Web Browser".

Bibliography: Google search for "pi".

Re:Calculating PI

[2901]

I thought the reviewers comment about it being hard to add up 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ... was a little odd.

Here is how to do it in CL

(* 4 (loop for i from 1 by 4 below 100000
sum (- (/ (float i)) (/ (+ i 2)))))
=> 3.1413836

The issue is the order in which subjects are taught. Simple use of computers, such as adding up
simple series, is concrete, while calculus is abstract and therefore harder to learn. It makes sense to learn the easier, concrete stuff first, then have it available as a resource to help with the abstract stuff, by grounding it in examples. So there is something wrong about a calculus course for the 21st century that don't assume the student can write simple computer programs and use them in the examples.

Re:Calculating PI

[lahvak]

I like your reasonning. Can you please explain that to my students, my dept. chair, and our school's administration?

Evgeny Shchepin: Lectures on Calculus

[azaris]

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.

More and more texts going online

[swished7]

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).

Book prices

[Gr8Apes]

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.

Drinking and differentiation

[Faust7]

Drinking and Deriving.

"Hey baby, let me find the tangent to your curves."

Re:Drinking and differentiation

[Demonspawn]

Are you convergent?

Incidentially

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Recommendation

[killermal]

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.

Yeah, but...

[slurpburp]

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.

Ironic.

[Mr. Flibble]

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!

Difference Equations to Differential Equations

[coreyb]

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.

Re:I never understood the idea of new calc books..

[DaHat]

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"

Calculus Wikibook

[MisterBad]

The Calculus book at Wikibooks is another Free (as in freedom) calculus book. It's well-written, if incomplete.

Sweet!

[13Echo]

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.

textbook economics

[AndyChrist]

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)

It's "Riemann"!

[Schreck]

The correct spelling is "Riemann", not "Reimann".

Simply for your information.

The best Calc text I've ever seen... Thompson

[tamills]

Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson

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.

Tacoma Narrows...

[jabberjaw]

Look no further thjanhere to see why differential equations are quite important.

Re:Free as in Beer?

[Traser]

Thanks to a faculty strike, (and professors locked out of campus) I had the privilege of attending last week's Math seminar in the local Lion's hall.

It was the first time I'd ever been to a math seminar with an open bar.

Excellent Free Linear Algebra Textbook

[zippe]

Hi,

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!!

Re:Excellent Free Linear Algebra Textbook

[SpaceRook]

Sweet! I was looking for a free linear algebra book.

UT grad here..

[fliptout]

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.

Textbooks online

[Anthracks]

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...

Choosing a textbook

[KimJ721]

I'm a grad student in a math department, so while I haven't participated in the process of choosing a textbook I have been witness to the outcome.

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.

Where are the "teacher's guides"?

[valkraider]

Screw the free Calculus books... I want the free answers to the Calculus exams!

Re:Gonna have to call BS on that one...

[sakusha]

The instructor came back to the test site, which was locked down and firemen prevented him from entering. Meanwhile I was over trying to find him at his office so I could hand in the test. I couldn't find him until several hours later, during which time I presumably could have consulted the textbook and cheated. So I got an F on the test.

Infinitesimals and Newton

[BigBadBri]

Infinitesimals (OK, not rigorously developed as they are now, but infinitesimals all the same) are at the heart of Newton's development of the calculus.

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.

Re:Infinitesimals and Newton

[sakusha]

Back in my day, it was presumed to be better to cover algebra more intensively and wait until college for calc. My high school added Advanced Placement calc classes a few years after I graduated, I would have taken it if it was offered.

Anyway, you sound like my elderly mom. She always says, "those darn college kids get younger and dumber every year." Of course she is slyly referring to the inverse corollary.

My favorite excerpts from "The Calculus Bible"

[The Wookie]

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."

Re:My favorite excerpts from "The Calculus Bible"

[Morosoph]

"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."

"Let he that is without sine cast the first stone!"

Calculus textbooks have a long way to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

>

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.

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:

In calculus, we often see differential variables (like dx) directly participating in arithmetic expressions. If differential variables are not real, then how can we justify performing arithmetic with them?

The answer is: we don't.

In standard calculus theory, we never perform arithmetic directly on differential variables. Instead, we replace each differential variable with its corresponding real variable before the arithmetic is performed.

For example, if someone writes "x + dx", then we consider it to be a shortcut for "lim(delta_x->0) x + delta_x".

It's interesting to observe that the addition operator in x + dx is actually not adding x and dx. Instead, the addition operator is adding x and delta_x, and we let delta_x become insignificantly small.

Now you can see why dx is so "elusive" -- it immediately transforms into delta_x whenever we attempt to perform arithmetic with it! We allow dx to participate in the notation of arithmetic, but we don't allow dx to participate in the performing of the arithmetic.

Of course, we could try to perform arithmetic directly on differential variables, but the results would be most unhelpful. The real number system does not have the ability to distinguish dx from 0, and so any attempt to perform arithmetic directly with dx would force us first to convert it to 0. This would typically result in arithmetic such as (x + 0) or (0 / 0), which is either trivial or undefined.

. . .

The derivative has a built-in mechanism that allows the insignificant delta_x terms to be hidden from view without actually discarding them.

Recall that the primary motivation for using df/dx instead of delta_f/delta_x is because of the tremendous simplification that can result in some cases. But this simplification applies only to the notation. We never take the illegal step of "simplifying" an expression by discarding non-zero terms from it!

For some students, it can be unsatisfying to learn that the derivative is only hiding the insignificant terms rather than discarding them. It might seem that if we could find a way to actually discard them, then we could achieve a kind of "perfect accuracy" for the derivative. Unfortunately, that approach doesn't work because the real number system is not powerful enough to support it. The real number system has an inconvenient "fuzziness" that becomes evident when we try to identify the smallest positive number. So the best we can do is to ensure that the derivative is "no fuzzier than" the real number system itself.

Formally, we do this by using the limit process to define the derivative. The limit process demonstrates that there are no obstacles to achieving any accuracy that we might desire -- and we thereby infer that the derivative is indeed "accurate". It turns out that this inference is good enough! In

It wasn't just the Navy....

[DesScorp]

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.

Re:It wasn't just the Navy....

[OceanBarb]

Dover Publications still publishes a few of these for incredibly low prices.

Re:It wasn't just the Navy....

[haruchai]

If I had a mod point, you'd get it.

Another great calculus book

[perkr]

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.

Textbook prices and The Freshman

[br00tus]

I went to college around the time the movie "The Freshman" with Matthew Broderick (remember WarGames?) came out. One of the jokes in the movie is his professor makes everyone buy a 7 book series on film which costs something like $700 and Broderick wonders where he's going to get the money from. The funny part is that the professor is the author of this series, and thus has an automatic customer for the books in his hundreds of students every semester, in other words, he's forcing his students to line his pockets with money.

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.

Free Texbooks

[The Taco Prophet]

I find this to be a very exciting idea, especially if a reasonable amount of the available texts are actually good. Yeah, I'm a dork... but here, at least, I ought to be in good company.

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?

Re:Free Texbooks

[bcrowell]

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?
See my sig.

Tie calculus to the MATRIX. . .

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

Everything that has a beginning has an end: A FINITE LINE

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

Why are Calculus books expensive?

[1iar_parad0x]

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.

Problem with math books(or me)

[Quill_28]

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.

Re:Free as in Beer?

[C. Alan]

Ouch. That was so bad it hurts.

Harrison's Laws of Math Textbooks

[marhar]

1. Anything entitled "Fundamental Theorem of X" will have no obvious connection to X.

2. Any section entitled "Applications of ..." is going to be a lot of work.

International Edition

[sewagemaster]

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...

Math for Morons Like Us

[NickFusion]

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.

Re:Gonna have to call BS on that one...

[1iar_parad0x]

3) He had an ASS of a professor who wanted him to fail!

Publishing On Demand

[NickFusion]

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.

Ugh... I hate stupid people.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 "Tables Method"

[Llywelyn]

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.

Re:The "Tables Method"

[brett42]

I only took 2 semesters of calc and 1 of linear algebra and I'm a CS major, so I may be talking out of my ass, but why should engineers need hardcore math theory? If you know that a given situation is modeled by a given equation, and it can be solved using a fairly mechanical technique, why should you care how the technique works? It's not "depending on something else to think for us," its taking advantage of the tools at hand.

I don't have anything against learning theory for those who need it, but if you're never going to use it, why bother?

Re:The "Tables Method"

[Llywelyn]

>but why should engineers need hardcore math theory?

The same reason 3rd graders don't need to be using calculators. The more advanced the mathematics you use on a daily basis, the more theory you need to substantiate it.

When you are sitting around a table doing back-of-the-envelope calculations you won't necessarily have a calculator or a computer and that is one of the foundations of engineering.

>If you know that a given situation is modeled by a given
>equation, and it can be solved using a fairly mechanical
>technique, why should you care how the technique works? ...because all models are wrong, but some are useful. You need to know the limitations on those models and often how to adapt them to get around those limitations. It also tells you what parts you can throw out--which speeds field calculations dramatically.

> It's not "depending on something else to think for us," its
>taking advantage of the tools at hand.

So is a third grader using a calculator. Just because you *can* doesn't mean that you *should* when you are first learning it. If you become dependent on the tools they become a crux that you can't even approximate your way out of, if you understand your tools then those "back of the envelope" calculations become that much easier.

Any monkey can plug i^i into a calculator and see the result.

Mac OS has PostScript support

[heyitsme]

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.

Yeah, because /usr/bin/pstopdf is so hard to use on Mac OS X.

I am starting a project for things like this

[kliment]

I am in the planning stage of a project called the Open Textbook Project to collect and distribute open-sourced (GPL, GFDL, CC) texts on various subjects. I would need help with the technical details, such as setting up a domain and a server and informing people about this. I have already started work on some mathematics text and I have been offered texts on chemistry by a high school chemistry teacher. Additionally, I would possibly have a team of up to 100 volunteers for editing and proofreading texts. Now, I seriously need help with this as I myself have very little time until the end of may. If anyone would be willing to help (and possibly donate server space etc) please contact me. You can see my current work on discrete math (only graph theory and some discrete algebra so far) at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/yanev/discmath/ (this is meant for a small group of people that study disc. math with me at the moment, I am a student myself, but I think it is generally usable for anyone interested in the topic)

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.

Textbooks seem like a natural market for e-books

[sjb21043]

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.

Hideous Fonts?

[twistedcubic]

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.

I design primary educational materials...

[simpl3x]

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?

Other Languages?

[fygment]

I'm currently looking for calculus books in French geared towards students going for degrees in business, psychology, etc.

Bah

[illuminatedwax]

Bah! These books (and any other calculus texts) are no match for the mighty Spivak Calculus book.

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

Postscript fonts

[sketerpot]

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.

Take a look at Connexions

[johnjosephbachir]

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!

Publishing democracy.

[fm6]

Hmm, I thought it was about, "Tim, we blew our damned budget on that NextStep cube, let's see you write some damned software for it!"

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.

Lots of interesting mathematical books for free:

[astro13]

Enjoy!

Looking for Open Source Math Ed Software project

[OceanBarb]

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?

more free books

[Anonymous Coward]

lots of free books http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlineb ooks.html

Put the SMACKDOWN on the book companies AND profe.

[Lotharjade]

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.

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 /. article.

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"

Calculus book review

[weeboo0104]

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?

Re:Hell hath no place in American primary --Except

[thufir]

Now the authors biases have been replaced with the rule makers.

Learned from Keisler's book and loved it

[TimMann]

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.

Re:Free as in Beer?

[Rheingold]

Oddly enough, I learned calculus from a former punk rocker who spent as much time in bars as I did--he graded papers while I did homework.

Re:I never understood the idea of new calc books..

[lahvak]

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.

It's all about distribution

[1iar_parad0x]

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.

Keisler in DjVu

[linoleo]

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.

It not ALL about distribution

[fm6]

Well yeah, the web democratizes distribution. But is distribution the problem with textbooks? If the Internet disappeared tomorrow, you could still distribute these Postscript textbooks via CD.

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?

So why...

[fm6]

...do those stupid NASA contractors continue to use English units? Inquiring minds want to know!

I Agree But... what about History and Literature

[Solx37]

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.

Re:"open content" maths

[OceanBarb]

I've just looked at it.

It looks like the software that I'm looking for (dreaming of???) would go in a separate "Section", say #5 after "Expositions." The Expositions appear to be the sort of content that would be behind the software that I have in mind.

*But* LaTex is a document preparation system, and what I'm looking for is more along the lines of a mathematical learning MOO, something like the old educational one that ran at MIT's Media lab for a while. Or like the well-known close-in reaches of LambdaMoo's dungeons (Cookie, anyone?).

I used Tex and LaTex years ago, but I know very little about how they are used today, and how the interface with websites and software. To wit, could content from PlanetMath be easily integrated with programming that would weave it together and add in exercises, drills, testing, etc? Are the same sort of folks who are contributing to PlanetMath likely to be ones who also do coding of this interactive sort just described?

Any ideas?

huh?

[NSash]

American Latin teaching is very suceptive to fads, the majority of which turn out to be very effective and often negatively impact the education students involved.

So are these fads good or bad?

Dover!

[Vann_v2]

I don't know how many people reading this actively study mathematics, but most of us students have, along the way, made a very good friend: Dover Publishers. Each of their books runs from about $10 to $30, though most are about $15. You can easily find [i]high quality[/i] math text here. To recommend some for Calculus/Analysis:

• 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.