How Would You Select a Textbook?

benj_e asks: "I'm thinking about doing some adjunct teaching at a couple of local community colleges, and have the opportunity to choose the textbook for an online JavaScript class. In the training classes I've given in the corporate world, I didn't have the need to select a text - there were no textbooks for the software I was teaching students to use aside from the manual. I'm pretty sure I want something with WebCT or Blackboard content, but other than that I'm, well, clueless. So, for all you educators out there - how do you go about selecting a textbook? What goes into your decision making process?"

Comments

As a teacher for web classes

[tod_miller]

I have not suggested any book for Javascript, and nor would I.

A search for any kind of book on Javascript woudl show up about 4 million websites, about 100k of them with up to date information, and about 20 books published within the last 3-4 years.

Students can use multiple sources to learn Javascript, a book is not one of them that comes to mind.

In a web design course in general (or web engineering) I usually get them either a resource on non technical aspects of web design tricks, and point them to W3schools, or certainly suggest a complete programming guide to the language they are learning. (which allows them to study it offline so to speak).

Many students may not have web access, but I feel that 3/4 A4 pages can disseminate so much about Javascript for a student based course that you do not need a programmer type reference for Javascript, all those no doubt giving thier O'Reiley versus XYZ Javascript book reviews shoudl bear that in mind.

I say write 4 pages of intro code to javascript and give 4-5 practical examples.

That is enough.

From a student

[Anonymous Coward]

As a student of computer engineering, I highly recommend just making your own handouts. You probably have tons of java books at your disposal just make copys of the things you like out of all kinds of books. Make sure you give credit to authors when need of course. I can tell you that students pay more attention to hand-outs then a chapter that they where supposed to read last week sometime.
In programming most text books are basically just semantics of that language anyways. You are there to teach the HOW and WHY. Books and handouts are just a reference for when you are unavailable. Also every person learns differently let your students go out and find a book they can understand and use instead of corralling them into a specific style.

Re:Is it just me?

[doktor-hladnjak]

I've actually taught Data Structures using both Java and C++. Both universities where these courses were taught did not choose these languages because they were used in industry. They chose them because they thought they would meet the needs of the specific course.

In my experience, the course in C++ was much less effective. The students spent much more of their time stumbling over the details of C++ (destructors, copy constructors, templates, the virtual keyword) than understanding the underlying data structures and OOP material. C++ is of course widely used in industry and academia, but it was just not the right language for those students at that point in their career for the material they were supposed to be learning. Personally, I'm not entirely sure why the department was using C++ at all. I imagine they wanted to teach it at that point since future courses would assume a C++ background.

In constrast, the course using Java worked pretty well. To begin with, Java (compiler and run-time) is available free (as in beer) and more or less runs the same on pretty much any system a student would use (Windows, Linux, Mac). Second, Sun has comprehensive documentation for the all their included built-in classes. I really liked this, because it allowed me to push the students to RTFM when they had relevant questions, which is a habit you want a programmer to pick up as soon as possible.

Java is also widely used in industry, but it just worked better for these students in that particular academic situation. Most importantly, by the end of the course using Java, a majority of the students seemed to understand the tradeoffs between lists, arrays, vectors, search trees, etc. They were also writing medium sized programs that could do semi-interesting things. The same could not be said for the students (admittedly at a different and less competitive university) who did the course in C++. They were still confused about data structure tradeoffs and were writing programs that did little more than create a data structure and perform some trivial operations on it.

It's probably worth pointing out that in both cases this was the second course students had to take in a sequence, so all of them had some initial experience programming. In one case (C++ school) they had done their first semester using ML and in the other (Java school) they used Scheme.

As I sit and think about it right now, off the top of my head, I'm not sure of any language that would clearly be superior to use in teaching Data Structures than Java. There are plenty of languages which would be roughly as good, but nothing leaps out as obviously better. Sure, something more obscure could be used, but these tend to offer less portability and thinner documentation. A lot of nice languages like Python, Perl, Scheme etc. lack the more rigid typing of Java or C++. C limits coverage of OOP, which while not the solution to everything is a major topic that needs to be covered.

You should just base it on web references

[drinkypoo]

For several subjects (math, electronics, javascript and some other languages) there are suitable online resources for learning. Anything of interest to nerds and/or geeks and conveyable using the internet is generally pretty well documented.