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Computer Textbooks For High Schoolers?
wetdogjp writes "I recently became a high school teacher, and I've inherited three classes with no textbooks! While two of my classes are introductory in nature, one for computers in general and the other for networking, the third class should prepare juniors and seniors to enter the workforce and start a career in computers. We have some older textbooks by Heathkit available, but the newest of them are four years old. Do Slashdotters have any favorite textbooks that can help kids on their way to becoming junior sysadmins, programmers, networking professionals, etc.? Would you suggest books to prepare students to take certification tests such as A+, Network+, or others? Any textbooks we use would need to cover quite a breadth of material, such as PC hardware, operating systems, networking, security, and more."
It has a problem with presenting facts in an orderly manner and often won't elaborate on some of the more advanced topics.
Dietel & Dietel publish a bunch of intro books (c++, java, a few others) that have a bunch of supplements/coding examples/etc. on their website. They're very newbie friendly and cover a good deal of information. Actually, so do some of the AP comp sci review books (my Baron's AP Java book has a lot of clear examples.)
Look at other high schools and community colleges that teach the same thing you do and see what books they're using.
Certification prep is a double edged sword. The books may be accessible, but they also may be too focused on the test and therefore teach to it rather than teach general skills.
Also, you don't need to use a book for everything. All my intro programming books do a brief overview of hardware, and my profs add when needed. I didn't even have a textbook for my high school computer hardware class (basically a build your own computer thing, but we also learned about karnough maps, logic, and other basics.)
open source modern art: laser taggi
I am in the process of writing a series of free ebooks for high school age students which teach the detailed fundamentals of how a computer works:
http://professorandpat.org/
The programming books are designed to work with a free development environment called MathRider:
http://mathrider.org/
Some of your students may find these to be useful.
Ted
Maybe he was thinking on teaching from 'The C Programming Language' by K&R, and the class project would be writing a Turing complete interpreter for the Game of Life.
I don't know about angles, but it's fear that gives men wings. -Max Payne
Are any employers anywhere willing to hire high schoolers in any tech jobs in today's economy?
You need to get out more and smell the recycled air at Best Buy, Circuit City, Apple stores etc.
Fairly sure those people are high school graduates at best. If those employees are college graduates, I am not sure that a college degree is worth all that much.
Me: Do you carry crossover cables?
Employee: What are those?
Me: A cable with cross-wired ethernet jacks at the ends.
Employee: What are you trying to use it for?
Me: To connect my desktop to my laptop
Employee: Well, you could use an external hard drive to transfer files over...
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
While I don't think I'm in a good position to recommend specific books, I feel that from my experiences with my nephew (we're quite close) I should add my 2 cents.
While you're in a great position to educate students with regards to computers and in reality, you could even prepare them for A+ and even Cisco or Juniper certification before they leave school, I believe that you should take advantage of the opportunity instead to teach them general computer knowledge and not specialized.
I have worked indirectly with CompTIA and have even assisted in writing books for A+ certification, but I prefer to believe that students taking courses voluntarily in high school should be directed towards higher education in computer science instead of providing them with a certification track that could allow them to go straight to work after high school. I believe that the A+, Network+, CCIE etc... track is great for guys that never got the higher education and want to work their way up the food chain without going to the university at the age of 30.
Don't get me wrong, preparing kids to take a CCIE which would get them $85,000-$125,000 a year the moment they graduate high school sounds great, but if they were able to achieve that by the time they left school, they could achieve so much more with a few years in the University.
Now, if you're teaching in a place where the students might otherwise be doomed to a life working in factories in dead end jobs, or in a place where the percentage of students continuing to higher education is disappointing, you would do them a great favor preparing them for certifications and careers straight out of high school. But if you make it obviously profitable for students to just ditch college and the university because they are certified for jobs right out of high school, then you could in fact be robbing the world of the valuable resources of higher educated scientists.
Teach the students computers as a science at the high school level, not as an engineering skill. If you're teaching at a proper (meaning public) high school as opposed to a vocational school, then computers should be approached in the same way as physics, biology or chemistry.
The students should leave your class knowing where computers come from, they should understand the history of computers. Maybe you should try to teach a limited set of electronics including discreet math (or just general boolean logic), you could even communicate with the local junior college and find out if you can design a credit track where you can use their curriculum to allow students to take college level 1st and 2nd year courses in high school and then take their finals at the college. This is actually how my high school worked and because of that many of the students continued on to New York Institute of Technology with 90% of their first two years of university credits completed.
Well, that was my two cents... I hope you find a good path to follow.
P.S. - if you do end up going down the certification track instead, please choose useful ones. A+ and Network+ are for guys driving silly vans to peoples houses with stupid names like Geek Squad. They're the fat assed, butt crack hanging out of their jeans plumbers of the computer business.
.. the third class should prepare juniors and seniors to enter the workforce and start a career in computers.
The point of high school is not (or should not be) to prepare kids to be mindless worker drones. The point of high school is (or should be) to give them a good, basic education.
Given the choice, I prefer a paper source over an internet link nine times out of ten. A good book, properly indexed, is almost always superior to someones personal page or site on a topic. There are exceptions, but overall books offer better presentations. The physical format of a book is also easier on the eyes, and more accessible than a computer monitor.
Hyperlinks are all very well for wiki-trips, but wiki-trips are really more for general knowledge learning. The question of the credibility of information on the internet also refuses to go away. Everyone by now has encountered information on wikipedia they know to be wrong or misleading. The same goes for websites. I don't mean to say that books and printed materials intrinsically have more credibility. But it's usually higher for them, though not by an order of magnitude.
If you want specific, detailed information and training on a topic, you need to read a book.
May the Maths Be with you!
I can see your point, but I can't actually remember when I last broke the spine of a non-fictional book to glean some information. In the real world the computing students will be much better off learning HOW to find the information they need that being handed a book filled with information, most of which is probably not even relevant to the tasks they'll be given.
This demonstrates the common misconception that the internet is full of useful and accurate information.
Textbooks have one major advantage over web pages. They have been through an editorial process. I know sites like Wikipedia do as well, but since one of their 'professors' turned out not even to have an undergrad degree, and they are all anonymous, that leaves a lot to be desired on the authenticity front.
Wikipedia's version of peer review is equally suspect. Peer review without identification of peers to the author is ok, but when the identity of the author whose work is being reviewed is also hidden, and the peer reviewers have no need to account for their suitability to act as reviewers the process becomes little more than a parody of the true process.
Its also my experience that a great deal of information on the web is copied from what people have read in books anyway.
Some sites, like IBM, Sun, Microsoft and other companies with a vested interested in programming do provide useful online resources, but they also produce books.
I reject utterly the argument that computing books are out of date the moment they are printed. I have textbooks dating back ten years which still contain information I use often. Just because some small aspects of a subject may change does not invalidate all previous information on the subject.
This is especially true of books which seek to teach the basics of programming. You could pick up a book produced a few years ago, use that exclusively for months, and come out of the other end with a sufficient understanding of the fundamentals to grasp any recent changes it didn't cover. Such books tend to cover such fundamentals that they don't go out of date too fast. If your language of choice wasn't one being used as a marketplace lever (Java and C# for example), this is even more likely to be the case.
I personally use a mix of online and printed word resources. Only rarely do I stray from sites where the author is identified by name, I prefer to take my information from resources where the author has at least felt enough responsibility for their work to take credit for it.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Only in the mainstream mediums, although sometimes they get it wrong and have to post a correction in the erratums column.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I was going to suggest the same thing. Even if you can't get webspace from your school's IT department, it'd be a trivial matter to set up a LAMP computer on your classroom's LAN and install MediaWiki on it-- or shell out ~$50 and get yourself a economy hosted website somewhere that offers a LAMP stack.
Then put up a skeleton structure for the course. Add some pages about what the course is, the curriculum and goals, time line, etc.
As each lesson comes around (or even a few in advance) post your notes to the wiki. Encourage students to elaborate or expand upon the wiki in any positive way. That can be anything from adding some links to educational sites, to updating out-of-date information, to fixing spelling & grammar.
Then, as a class project, break your class up into teams of 2-3 people. Assign each of them a course topic. Have them research the material, and for a deliverable, they need to create the wiki page for that topic. Give them some guidelines (must have 3 sources that will be [cited], must contain at least 3 useful links to other intra-wiki pages, etc). Maybe even have them present their findings. Future classes might have the same requirements, but instead must find 2 new facts about their topic that aren't currently in the wiki.
Make sure you have a nice index page, set up the Random page, and the thing will build itself. It's something that each student will have had a hand in making. Limit editing to Registered Only, and make sure you approve accounts (or pre-generate them for your students). This will cut down on vandalism. It will also give you, the person who will be grading their work, a full snapshot of who did what work, as well as a complete revision history.
At the end of the semester, not only will you have a really good completed project, but it will also be extremely useful for future classes. You effectively have all your notes created and kept in a presentable manner. You can even put it on a public-facing computer, and open it up for other classes or teachers (even those beyond your own school) to use. (You might want to limit it to a public read-only, until you are ready to release the entire project into the wild...)
UTF-8: There and Back Again
What good is a perfected worded book that is four or more years old, and irrelevant compared to internet resources, as the summary informs?
For high school classes, printed books of that age are just fine. How much have Windows, Mac, and even Linux changed in the last four years? Not enough to wipe away the basics. Look at the established reference for TCP/IP: it's nearly 15 years old. If they're teaching programming, a four-year-old textbook would be new enough for the basics of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, HTML, and a long list of other languages.
Relevance does not require the absolute latest version of everything, especially when preparing for the business world, where the version in use of a given program or language is often 3+ years old.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.