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Education

Linux Textbooks? 59

Posted by Cliff from the pioneering-a-new-market dept.
whymw asks: "I am a computer science instructor at our local community college where I teach an introductory level Linux course. Due to worries about Microsoft licensing, my director is interested in moving other courses such as office packages to the Linux environment. However this question keeps poping up - 'What would we use for textbooks?' There is little to pick from and I see this as a major barrier to widespread adoption of Linux in the classroom. Do we need to create a linuxtexts.org? Should openoffice.org fork off a textbook project? By the way, I said TEXTbook, complete with labs, assignments, and hopefully a testbank." Linux has to make it into the education market at some point. If there are no Linux textbooks out right now, what recommendations would you have from the current crop of off-the-shelf books?
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Linux Textbooks? More

Linux Textbooks?

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  • Just saving RMS the trouble.

    };>

  • what's wrong with non-textbooks? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jnana ( 519059 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @02:32PM (#3524823) Journal
    ...this question keeps poping up - 'What would we use for textbooks?'

    What is wrong with using non-textbooks and writing a lab manual with exercises. I have taken computer classes before that didn't use textbooks -- and I've taken classes that did use awful textbooks, where we would have been better off using a non-textbook.

    As far as OpenOffice goes, I've just started using it after using Word for a long time, and I find it intuitive enough (and enough like Word) that a textbook on using it would be a waste of paper.

    There are plenty of good FAQs out there, which are good learning resources. And isn't it the job of the instructor to design assignments, labs, and testbanks? In subjects other than the sciences, this is certainly the case, so I don't really see your concerns being a problem.

    • Take it as a compliment, please, when I say that you are in the blessed minority (along with a lot of other /.ers and, I'd hope, myself). You're able to pull together disparate sources of information -- FAQs, man pages, example code on someone's hobby site -- and synthesize a full learning experience from them. And while this can be a very productive way of working, it's also a somewhat non-traditional one.

      Assuming that we're also talking about introductory level courses here, some of the students in question may not be used to (or even capable of) learning that way. In those cases, having a good textbook for one-stop info shopping both in and out of class is not necessarily a bad thing. (I know that when I was learning Perl, the llama book was a godsend during that first week or two, particularly the exercises at the end of each chapter.)

      Also, a good textbook can be the best defense against a bad instructor. (And best intentions aside, you'd be surprised how many of these there are out there.) If the professor is a wash, you can at least go off on your own and learn what's in the text. And if you're lucky enough to get a good instructor, she/he will likely use the text only as a starting point for even more in-depth discussions.

      • Take it as a compliment, please, when I say that you are in the blessed minority (along with a lot of other /.ers and, I'd hope, myself). You're able to pull together disparate sources of information -- FAQs, man pages, example code on someone's hobby site -- and synthesize a full learning experience from them. And while this can be a very productive way of working, it's also a somewhat non-traditional one.

        That's the original poster's point, I believe. You're probably right in that such synthesis is beyond the capabilities of an intro student. However, instructors should be able to synthesize these sources themselves and then provide them to the students.
        • However, instructors should be able to synthesize these sources themselves and then provide them to the students.

          Good instructors should be able to, yes. But, as I'm sure we can all attest to, you're not always guaranteed to get a good instructor. Or even a competent one.

          A good textbook is a safety net. It provides a bare minimum of learning. A good instructor may not use it at all, but at least it's there.

          • Good instructors should be able to, yes. But, as I'm sure we can all attest to, you're not always guaranteed to get a good instructor. Or even a competent one.

            I guess that I see the issue of instructor quality as orthogonal to the issue of textbook quality. A good instructor with a lousy textbook will still be able to teach a good class. And a good instructor with good resources (whether a textbook or otherwise), should be able to teach a great class.

            On the other hand, if you've got a lousy instructor, the best textbook in the world isn't going to help you.

            You're saying that if a student has a lousy instructor but a good textbook then they can go ahead and study the textbook on their own. I understand the point and obviously it's true in certain cases. But it seems to me that a student who is going to study the textbook on their own already has the resources to synthesize the disparate data sources. So it becomes a moot point: students who are self-directed enough to study a textbook on their own whon't be limited by a crappy instructor anyway.

            That being said, I'm all for more and more resources of higher and higher quality. My point of contention is with the idea that a textbook, per se, is desirable. In general, textbooks provide breadth but not depth. If I recall correctly, you mentioned how "Learning Perl" was a lifesaver when you were in a Perl class with a lousy instructor. That's exactly my point. That book isn't a traditional textbook.

            I'm really not trying to be argumentative. It's just that this is an issue close to my heart. I'm going to be a professor of sociology one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) and I'm committed to not using textbooks in my courses. (Besides the fact that most textbooks such, I believe that using original sources demonstrates to the class the discipline is really like. Yeah, assigning the original article requires more effort from the students but I think that they get so much more out of it than if they read a textbook's summary of it.)
        • Also doing things this way will save on buying very expensive textbooks for each student which have to be replaced every year.
      • able to pull together disparate sources of information -- FAQs, man pages, example code on someone's hobby site -- and synthesize a full learning experience from them. And while this can be a very productive way of working, it's also a somewhat non-traditional one.

        Now if I could just learn in the 'normal' way. . . .

        I have no problem reading through an n-page FAQ, but damnit if I can sit down and read straight through a texbook. :)

        (the fact that most textbooks are written in such a style as that they are not meant to be read straight through does not help any either. . . .)

        I have encountered websites that contained ALL of the information imparted to students in (insert college course here) and from which I was able to pull the information from in a matter of mere hours instead of the multitudes of weeks that many classes require.

        Ick. I want Asimov please. :) (His non-fiction stuff was wonderful, even people who do not like his fiction often times like his non-fiction. He was able to write on almost any topic and make it highly interesting and easily memorizable. :) )

    • Why textbooks?

      There are lots of reasons for wanting to have a pre-purchased textbook... here are a few that I can think of:

      • Because they are a tried and tested method of teaching and learning which does not require and computer skills to pickup and use.
      • A text book can be picked up and read without the need for any computer equipment (eg. on the bus)
      • Having a text book that the course is based on allows the faster students to read around the topic if they get bored
      • I don't know what length of course we are talking about but can you imagine the effort needed to write all the information for a year long course up front?
      • Text books are published and usually read by large numbers of people, this allows mistakes to be collected and corrected. This is very difficult to do on your own.
      • FAQ's are crap - I don't mean to flame but they are, they are only of use to people with a reasonable understanding of the subject area
      • Specifically in reply to your OpenOffice statement - what if you've never used a word processor? or a computer? In those circumstances a book can be very useful.

      • Having said all that you are correct in assuming that the instructor should design assignments and labs etc. but there are always core text books to refer back to and to look stuff up. A good textbook can become a core reference that can be relied apon to give the correct information, and is always there on your shelf. Unlike the web and howto's and FAQ's which can give the wrong answer, or just have disappeared over night.

        Yes you should teach people to find out information on the web, and learn to read FAQ's but this is the wrong entry point for most beginners. Remember that people taking these kind of beginers courses could easily be the kind of people who cannot set the time on the VCR! You need to start with easy to use tools that people are used to, most people will have been taught from text books in the past and so will find it less intimidating if you provide them with a familiar method of learning.

  • I know that the A+ Certification for Dummies has a test at the end of each chapter along with "walk along" projects. Maybe the Linux Certification for Dummies has the same thing. (plus it comes with a CD for students to learn). This would be an interesting class I would love to take!
  • We used this in our intro to linux class... wasn't too bad. I don't know if it serves the purpose of having q/a in it as well, can't remember that far back ..

    You can check it out here [amazon.com], though I'm not sure if it's in print now... :(

  • Actually, I have one. Here, let me post the ToC:

    1. FSF Indoctrination
    2. The Importance of Smelling Yucky
    3. Is Someone Else Talking? Start Pontificating!
    4. How To Steal IP But Remain Self-Righteous
    5. ./configure; make; install libs; make again; install more libs; remake; upgrade kernel; make one more time
    6. Dressing Like Yoda
    7. Which Buzzwords Do I Use?
    8. What Names Do I Drop?
    9. Replacing S with $: A Guide To MS Bashing
    10. Belittling Others Effectively
    11. Appendix A: Star Wars Trivia
    12. Appendix B: Anime Porn Screenshots

  • Why textbooks? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by IIRCAFAIKIANAL ( 572786 )
    Teach them to use the docs or man-pages or whatever :) Teaching someone to find information on their own is an indespensible skill.

    When I went to school, the focus was often on learning how to find the relevant information and apply it. What you are describing sounds suspiciously like rote-learning.

    Our instructors, for the most part, designed and wrote all of the exercises and tests we did too (this was the Computer Engineering Technology program at SAIT in Calgary, Alberta). Additionally, if you rely on textbook exams for testing, you will see a lot of plagiarism and cheating - better to write the exams and exercises yourself and vary them class by class.

    Rather than buying textbooks, convince the school to pay you to write them, along with creating test banks and exercises. If they own the copyrights, they can print off as many as they need and save a lot of money in the end (especially if they are a large school).

    Many of my classes had textbooks, but a lot of them relied on in-house developed texts, especially when suitable textbooks didn't exist.

  • just a suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 56ker ( 566853 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @02:44PM (#3524921) Homepage Journal
    I used to have a very good chemistry teacher who managed to teach us without textbooks for three years. He just made us write about three to four A4 sides of notes - so by the end of the year we had the equivalent of a textbook anyway! It also meant people actually learnt it rather than a textbook just getting dusty on a shelf.
    • Oh and while I'm on the topic you can't get experienced in using an OS just by reading a textbook - you need to spend time getting to know how to do things with it.

  • Suggestions (Score:3, Informative)

    by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @03:02PM (#3525051)

    Well none of these are "traditional" textbooks, they are all usefull sources of information.

    • Running Linux
    • Learning the Vi Editor (Rather simple, but you should know how to use at least one of the more common editors).
    • Linux Cookbook (Free PDF download, btw)
    • Linux Problem Solver (btw, did I mention that no-starch press rocks?)
    • Learning Perl (Since Perl is a wonderful tool under Linux)
    • groups.google.com (great place to find answers)
    • The Blender Book (Since blender is fun)

    Throw in a book about the GNU philosophy & history of linux, add another about linux security, and you're set.

  • The basic business model of Microsoft and friends is to sell software for a cost with lousy documentation and support so they are only too happy if there are a lot of 3rd party texts like XP for dummies (actually that title could mean a lot of things).

    On the other hand the business model of Linux distributing companies is to give the software for free and earn on support so it doesnt really make sense for them to support 3rd party textboks which make the user self sufficient

    Mind you here I am talking about lay users not programmers . Programmers would in any case get their support from usergroups not Red Hat

  • There are lots of great textbooks on beginning UNIX, they don't have to be Linux specific. But when I taught a Linux class at a local trade school, I put together my own documentation. You can also visit The Linux Documentation Project [tldp.org] where they have lots of guides and How-to's which most (if not all) are GPL'd and free to use.

  • Textbooks, Resources, LDP (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rubinson ( 207525 ) <rubinson @ e m a i l.arizona.edu> on Wednesday May 15, 2002 @03:33PM (#3525277) Homepage
    As an academic myself, a few different issues spring to mind. I'll try to organize them in a somewhat coherent fashion.

    First, I would ask if you really need textbooks? While most professors still use textbooks, a lot of people do fine without using any textbooks at all. Yes, it requires more effort on the part of the professor to research all of the sources themself; however, in my experience, the results are certainly worth it. Rather than teaching a politically-correct, watered-down course, you can tailor it to precisely what you feel is important. And shouldn't that be a professor's obligation anyhow?

    For sources, I would start with the LDP [tldp.org], the FSF [gnu.org], O'Reilly [oreilly.com], and Addison-Wesley [awprofessional.com]. These guys easily make up over 95% of my tech bookshelf.

    Addison-Wesley also does textbooks [aw.com]. I don't know how good they are but if they pay as much attention to their textbooks as they do to their IT texts, they'll be excellent.

    On another matter, if you're going to consider rolling your own textbooks, don't reinvent the wheel. Much, if not most, of the documenation out there is under a free-as-in-speech license. Use it. Also, I don't think that you need to start your own website. I can't speak for the LDP but it seems to me that they would be delighted to assist you in developing the texts that you need.

    Finally, if you go to the effort of developing all of this content, please do the right thing and share it with the community. Ideally, this would through a free-as-in-speech license.
  • ...if you are willing to look at the bigger picture, namely, in terms of
    • history & heritage
    • ethos and methodology.

    It's practically axiomatic that you don't want to bombard the students with too much, too soon. So here's how I would do it (I'm someone who came to using Linux the self-taught way, so you may want to approach it differently).

    • Historical reasons for Unix development: I would summarise (and not ask that students purchase) Peter Salus' A Quarter-Century of Unix. While it's fascinating, your students may find it a bit too trainspotter-ish/nitpicky or even hard to find. As well, various online sources have potted histories of the OS available.

      I'd want to talk briefly - no longer than 30 minutes to an hour - about the Unix incompatibilities that arose in the 1980s, and how they led to Unix fragmentation. This would be a good set-up for compare-and-contrast exercises with, say, the Microsoft situation today, as well as Apple's Macintosh development. Most importantly, it leads you straight into short summaries of how and why Linux/BSD grew out of the chaos. Also, there's the historical section of the FreeBSD Handbook online -- it's pretty cool.

      You don't have to get religious about using Linux or the BSDs; just demonstrate how they work and let your students decide for themselves if they like it or not.

    • For an introduction to general Unix architecture: there are free online versions of the old Macmillan Press textbook, Unix Unleashed, floating around, replete with chapter exercises and so forth. Also look at Jon Lasser's Think Unix. Finally, the Running Linux book is quite good for introductory-level practical tips and tricks. This last book is probably the only one I'd recommend for purchase.


    In summary, there are a lot of books around. A search on Amazon will be much more complete than I could ever be, but I think this should give a few hints. Good luck!
  • have you considered that linux is, in reality, just a variant of unix. so any textbooks for unix will work for linux. and since unix has been used in uni's for decades, i'm sure there are a few.

    that said i didn't have many cs textbooks that mentioned any os. "the design and implementation of bsd 4.x" was about the only one i can think of. but then i graduated from uni 10 years ago as of 17/5. god that's depressing.

  • DIY (Score:2)

    by gmhowell ( 26755 )
    I assume that teaching a few JC classes means you aren't into teaching for life, just for a little extra money. But in any event, why not write your own textbook? Don't know if any publisher would buy it, but you could at least force your own students to get it. Better yet, start a sourceforge project.

  • Learn it, live it, love it.
    Let me say it one more time, O'Reilly [oreilly.com].
  • As someone who was required to take an Intro to Linux class in order to satisfy prerequisites, I can say from experience that Harley Hahn's Student Guide To Unix [amazon.com] is an excellent textbook for such a class. While it's slightly outdated, the book did its job.

  • So it's shameful self-promotion, but I wrote Think Unix [cluestickconsulting.com] so that it could be used effectively as a textbook.

    There are practice problems scattered throughout each chapter, with answers in the back of the book. It's short enough to be used as the sole textbook for a seven-week Unix course, or as one of several books in a longer course.

    And if a couple thousand Slashdot readers buy the book, I may one day make back my advance. :-)

  • Linux: The Textbook (Score:2, Informative)

    by edgarde ( 22267 )
    Linux: The Textbook [aw.com]

    Publisher: Addison Wesley
    Copyright: 2002
    Format: Paper, 678 pp
    ISBN: 0-201-72595-9
    Status: Published 07/02/2001
    Retail Price: $52.00 US

    I know nothing about this publication, but the table of contents [aw.com] suggests it covers the areas you want.

  • Our professor aloud us to do assignments on our own Linux boxes using for our Intro to Unix class. We used this book:

    UNIX MADE Easy [amazon.com]

    It has individual chapters that goes over tools like vi, grep, using Korn and C Shells. As well as setting up printers. I enjoyed the book and it spells everything out for you. As well as example questions at the end of each chapter. I don't think it had a testbank though. You got to make that up yourself.

  • I beleve behind the question of textbooks lies another, bigger question: what is the best method of teaching Linux? A textbook is a container of important data structured by the method of conveying it to the user.

    So, what is the best way to learn Linux? How did you learn it? What was interesting?
    • So, what is the best way to learn Linux? How did you learn it?

      Assuming this question isn't rhetorical, I'd just like to say something.

      Linux is something that people who are passionate about computers and code are going to run across sooner or later. If you're lucky, maybe three kids out of a introductory class will have the sort of mindset conducive to exploring on their own. Most of them just want to play Quake, skip class, wear baggy trousers, and download copies of Win2k.

      How do I know? I just took an introductory programming course. And I couldn't believe the sheer _apathy_ of the bulk of the students.

      The first *nix I learned was NetBSD, then OpenBSD, and a little bit of Linux here and there. I learned it the same way most people do - indulgent friends, hours on Google, and having nothing better to do when I was working the night shift.

      Most intro students don't care enough to bother. That's why telling them to RTFM won't work and that's why this question was asked.

      --saint

  • why? (Score:1)

    by junkgui ( 69602 )
    why would you want to pay for text books if you didn't have to?
  • First you have to really ask what yo uare going to teach:
    Linux is an open source kernel that comprises the core of an open source operating system.
    The vast majority of the operating system and applications you use on what is typically called a "Linux" machine is written by GNU, and other open source projects (Xfree86, PERL, Samba, etc).
    A book on Linux would be simple, it only covers the one small part of the operating system. What you are asking for is a single textbook that will cover all the disparate appliations on the system. To relate this to the "mainstream computing world" it would be like looking for a single text book that covers MSOffice, Windows, Windows Explorer, IIS, Photoshop, Flash and all the other applications and components of a Windows environment.
  • LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell [barnesandnoble.com] is very good, since it is preping you to certify for LPI 101 and LPI 102 it contains excersies and questions.

    For Electronic references start here:
    O'Reilly Open Books Project [oreilly.com]
  • I learned Linux with the Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] book. The ENTIRE THING is a lab exercise!

    -Lx?

  • unfortunately, this particular type of subject matter is not particularly prone to having textbooks, esp. good ones. the BEST text (introductory) i have seen is actuall the dummy's book. it is informative, as well as an interesting read (some of the details at least). think of programming books: learn in 21 days!! most of those books are SHIT anyway, i always use the C bible when teaching. Usually, professors are better off having a GUIDE in the right direction as opposed to a rigid manual.

    last resort
    man textbook:
    No manual entry for textbook

    too bad :(

    QED
  • Hundreds of pages of good solid stuff available for free from here [sourceforge.net]
    Do the decent thing and buy a copy from the site though.

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