Slashdot Mirror
CS Faculty and Students To Write a Creative Commons C++ Textbook
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."
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."
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.