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CS Faculty and Students To Write a Creative Commons C++ Textbook

Posted by samzenpus on from the write-it-yourself dept.

Cynic writes "Inspired by an earlier Slashdot story about Finnish teachers and students writing a math textbook, I pitched the idea of writing our own much cheaper/free C++ textbook to my programming students. They were incredibly positive, so I decided to move forward and started a Kickstarter project. We hope to release the textbook we produce under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and sell cheap hard copies to sustain the hosting and other production costs."

4 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Book written by a comittee by Animats · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A book written by a committee will be a painful read.

    If you want to do something useful, create one of those single plastic sheet two page guides to the language. Boiling the language down to two pages of small type with a few diagrams is a useful exercise. More useful than another thousand page book of blithering.

  2. Done by Psychotria · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Pledged ($50). I don't care if the book turns out crap or not; more people should release books in this manner (IMO) so the decision to pledge was very easy.

  3. Reconsider the choice of license by xaxa · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Richard Stallman gives good reasons why this CC license is the wrong one to use: http://stallman.org/articles/online-education.html

  4. Re:Lost me @ CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 3, Interesting

    NonCommercial is going to make it useless as a textbook. It can't even be included in, for example, Debian or other Linux distributions.