Slashdot Mirror
New Science Books To Be Available Free Online
fm6 writes "Bloomsbury Publishing, best known for the Harry Potter books, has announced a new series of science books that will be available for free online. Bloomsbury thinks they can make enough money off of hard-copy sales to turn a 'small profit.' The online version will be covered by a Creative Commons license which allows free non-commercial use. They've already had some success with the one book they've published this way, Larry Lessig's 'Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy.' The series, 'Science, Ethics and Innovation,' will be edited by Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project."
A free introductory Calculus book (a CC license):
http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html
There is a free complex analysis book:
http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~r-ash/CV.html
A free algebraic topology book:
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/#ATI
Wikipedia has lots of math articles that are very useful for some purposes. I'd be interested if anybody knows of any other resources.
If you just need "cheap", Dover publications puts out lots of inexpensive math books ($10-$20 for material that could be $100+ elsewhere). Google for their website or just check Amazon. Note though that these are mostly older books, which means, for the most part, that they are much more rigorous than current books.
Be aware that if by "algebra" you mean elementary algebra (what you learn in middle/high school), algebra means something different to mathematicians, so a textbook on algebra may not be what you want.
I expect that Bloomsbury will indeed make a small profit.
There are many books that are sold profitably even though their contents is available in its entirety online and is redistributable. Project Gutenberg has the complete works of Shakespeare online, a text in the public domain that anyone can print. Yet thousands of print copies of these works are sold through bookstores every month. The same can be said of other classic works now in the public domain, as well as some editions of the Bible, and most classical music scores.
I believe this situation is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Unlike audio and video recordings, which by their nature require some type of playback device, books are self-contained and offer certain advantages over even the most advanced and unrestricted reading device.
Are there any good, free resources for learning Algebra and up?
There are plenty of sites and free books online that will get you through calculus. For (elementary, not linear or abstract) algebra, a Google search should net you hundreds of sites. For higher subjects, http://www.theassayer.org/ should get you started.
As Hatta suggested, used bookstores and thrift stores are good for cheap high school-level textbooks. Don't count on finding anything higher than calculus texts, though. If you're looking for texts to study abstract algebra, set theory, game theory, et cetera, you may have to visit a university library to find physical books.
If you go to the National Academy Press web site, http://www.nap.edu/about.html, you will find that many of their books are available in PDF format, and that many of those can be downloaded for free. To find what you are interested in, use the search box in the upper left hand side of their about page. Since we taxpayers paid for most, if not all, of the work being presented, perhaps they all should be free.
Would you mind explaining the distinction?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra:
Elementary algebra is often part of the curriculum in secondary education and provides an introduction to the basic ideas of algebra, including effects of adding and multiplying numbers, the concept of variables, definition of polynomials, along with factorization and determining their roots.
Algebra is much broader than elementary algebra and can be generalized. In addition to working directly with numbers, algebra covers working with symbols, variables, and set elements. Addition and multiplication are viewed as general operations, and their precise definitions lead to structures such as groups, rings and fields.
Scan through the section on abstract algebra farther down the page.
/...
RTFA. These aren't textbooks. They're a series of books on science and ethics edited by a Nobel Prize winner.
Warning: The Keisler calculus book you mention uses what's called "nonstandard analysis", involving "hyperreal numbers", and is very different from what you learn in most calculus courses. This isn't to say that it is a bad book - in fact it is a very good one. But nonstandard analysis, while valid, hasn't really caught on since it was invented by Robinson in the 1960s in spite of some vocal advocates. Just be aware that after this book, some of the things in the ordinary high school or college Calculus-I book are going to be unfamiliar. And while rote manipulations with hyperreal numbers aren't too hard to learn, to understand them rigorously involves abstract math and set theory much deeper than that needed for the real numbers and limits of standard calculus (see the Epilogue of the book).