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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."

7 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Absolutely fantastic! by toygeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    Its that kind of thinking, collaboration, and progress that revolutionizes industries. Best of luck to you!

    --
    Nobodies Prefect
    Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
    1. Re:Absolutely fantastic! by CaptQuark · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed!! One of the major costs of college was the $100 text books that showed the basics of a language and example code, but it wasn't something that I would keep as a reference for future study. I think a Creative Commons book that can be updated and improved each year will be attractive to both the professors and the students. Asking each class that uses the book to send in the top 5 suggestions will help give feedback on what can be improved each year. Not every suggestion will be used, but it can keep the book improving each year. The hard part will be getting the professors to agree to teach from the book until at least the second year it is available.

    2. Re:Absolutely fantastic! by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Here's hoping that arrays and pointers end up near the end of the book. I've seen more CS students completely hosed by profs teaching pointers, char[] and other arrays in Chapter 1, along with having them design linked lists, bubble sorts and such in their first few weeks of learning to program and their intro to C++. Teach <iostream>, <string>, <vector>, <map>, <algorithm>, etc. While doing that, teach about control structures: if, while, for, switch, and so on. Teach exceptions from the start. Then teach (properly) OO and inheritance. Drill the Liskov substitution principle into their heads when doing this. Explain about static vs. dynamic polymorphism. Then teach about pointers, arrays, data structures and algorithms. Start at the high-level and then drill down to the important stuff. Make sure that they see how fast and efficient <algorithm> is and ensure that they compare their algorithmic efficiency to what is in the standard library. I don't want to find another bubble sort or linked list implementation in production C++ code ever again.

      If you want an indication of the sad state that C++ education is in, hang out on a C++ beginner forum for a while. Many schools are still teaching using pre-C++98 tools -- using Borland compilers from the early '90s. Why do that when there are really good, modern, free C++ compilers available?

      --
      the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
  2. The easy part is writing what to do in C++ by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The hard part is writing the book of what NOT to do in C++. That would easily take several volumes.

    As a good comparison, consider O'Reilly's JavaScript: The Good Parts, which is a mere 176 pages.

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  3. Re:Book written by a comittee by six025 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    So let me get this straight.

    1. This is Slashdot, where we routinely see articles decrying expensive textbooks required for university courses
    2. A professor and a group of students are actually DOING SOMETHING to address this problem by writing text book for C++
    3. The aim is to make this book freely available via the web, or as an easily affordable hardback
    4. The contents of the book are basically open and may be revised at any point without expensive publishing costs
    5. You have come here to day to complain that this initiative is a waste of time

    Have I got that right?

    Peace,
    Andy.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.