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FDL Math Textbooks? 45

Posted by Cliff from the finding-a-better-textbook dept.
PyTHON71 asks: "I'm working through Schaum's Outlines of College Algebra. So far, in chapter 17 (conic sections), I've found 6 errors! Since I can spot them and correct them, I'm not worried about myself. But without math, you can't hack, and if young hackers are getting hung up on stupid math mistakes made by textbook authors... well, it's obviously a case for FDL textbooks. Are any textbooks being produced under the FDL?"
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FDL Math Textbooks? More

FDL Math Textbooks?

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  • fp! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    link [planetmath.org]
    • Never would have thought it - a useful first post.

      I quickly looked over the site (I'm at work, so I can't do too much random surfing), and it looks pretty useful.

  • I think I need to brush up on some of my math, but I don't want to go out and buy college textbooks at a hundred dollars a pop. I know that I can go through and learn from the book, as I have done on several occasions when the instructor is catering to the lowest denominator. And, of course, it's relatively easy to do math in the comfort of your own home, as opposed to, say, chemistry.

    FDL documents would be generally available on the web, so I don't have to worry about paying for several books, and they

    • You don't have to get college textbooks at several hundred dollars a pop. You can buy really good maths and science textbooks in paperback from Dover [yahoo.com] for around ten to twenty dollars. What you get is generally a classic originally published 20-50 years ago. As was common then, these books have informative content instead of color illustrations and cute sidebar articles. They also don't have the latest developments, but it's very likely that what you want to learn was thoroughly developed and well-understood

  • Good stuff. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hafree ( 307412 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @12:43PM (#5853440) Homepage
    I love when people use acronyms that nobody knows. I also love the apparent lack of editorial process involved in selecting ask slashdot questions. Kthxbye.
  • Of course, we don't need to be limited to math. Textbooks on a number of subjects may be helpful. Who knows, maybe some of them may become mandatory reading at various schooling levels.
  • usually when you correct mistakes they give you cash! atleast give them a call before ranting about how bad the book is. Maybe they have already corrected the issue?

    And if you don't want people to have the mistakes in the future, write in the book! make the corrections, tell your friends, have them make the corrections, how hard is it?

  • If you think math textbooks are bad... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mstorer3772 ( 526790 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @12:52PM (#5853523) Homepage
    ...Try k-6 science books. YOW!

    A guy by the name of Bill Beaty maintains a giant time-sucking vortex of a web page:

    http://www.amasci.com

    A portion of the site is devoted to correcting common misconceptions found in science textbooks, and about how these misconceptions hamper later learning:

    http://amasci.com/miscon/miscon.html

  • Not to be condensending but those Schaum's outline series books really suck. They are poorly written and, as you've noticed, are not highly regarded for quality. You could write the publisher and notify them of the errors but, frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if they fail to act on them. I can only guess that you chose Schaum's because they are cheap as dirt. If price is an issue, I recommend you look into books by Dover Publications. They also provide cheap textbooks on mathematics but they are actual

    • you're right, unless you're programming 3d conic sections are probably not all that interesting to you, but what about linear algebra? Try optimising any reasonably sophisticated data structure with the basic rules there. You can program without math, it's just not likely you're programming well.
  • Schaum's Outlines != textbooks.

    Sometimes they are useful in conjunction with a real textbook, by providing a different perspective or example. But in any conflict, the textbook should be trusted more.

    Look at it this way: if you wanted to read some classic literature for your own interest and self-improvement, are you going to pick up a stack of Cliff's notes? That's what Schaum's Outlines are: they are something you can temporarily absorb in order to pass tests. A few innaccuracies don't really matter.

    In

  • FDL (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is FDL the 'good' or the 'bad' cholesterol? I keep forgetting.

  • For highschool students I wouldn't worry... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OwnerOfWhinyCat ( 654476 ) * on Thursday May 01, 2003 @01:27PM (#5853823)
    I know when you're thinking in "math mode" the book is supposed to be correct, and that is supposed to be an inarguable given.

    I think there is another perspective worth considering however.

    There is the teenager (type K) that gets the right answer and can't make it match the one in the back of the book.

    There is the teenager (type N) that sees a glimpse of "all that is math" (ok, a limited version) and is overwhelmed that they are having a hard time with Alg. 1 when they still have Geometry, Alg. 2, Trig, Pre-Calc, and Calculus just to get out of highschool and into a good college.

    My observations were:
    That type N teenagers outnumbered type K's by at least 5 to 1.

    That type K students had attention spans on the order of double the length of that of the average teenagers, but that this was still usually in the vicinity of 20 minutes of frustration before, "giving up and asking the teacher the next day."

    I also noticed type N students were consistently relieved to see that the book could get things wrong, though later in life I attributed this to sloppy publishing, they seemed to take it as a sign that the math they were doing was "hard to get right, even for the experts who write these books." This seemed to validate their struggles.

    Though this event only happened twice, in my 5 years of high-school math, it's impact to me and the other student was noteworthy. I was a type K and can remember the day I told the Calculus teacher that I had a particular answer for a problem that didn't agree with the book, and (as good teachers often do) she wrote the problem on the board and talked through the steps as she did them to help me spot the logic error. The other students, envious of the ease with which math seemed to come to me, were glad of the opportunity to see me screw up in an illustratedly public fashion. The teacher came to the same answer I had, and when I told her so, she stepped back for a count of 1, as if that was all the time it took her to completely rework the problem in her head, and shrugged and said "Well, the book is wrong." and went back to her desk. Some several days later my ego came back down to a livable size, but I had forever shed the last vestiges of the std. teenager's insecurity, "I may not be smart enough to understand this."

    My conclusion is:
    Even if not for my, and another students, "special victories" over the oppressive self-righteousness of the HighSchoolPoliceState, my first three observations lead me to conclude that these errors, did at least as much good as harm. I also conclude that even the type K's benefited more than they lost, since having the type N's functioning at greater efficiency meant that they'd have to listen to fewer stupid questions during class, and noticeably less whining during the "quiet study" periods.

    Even if this conclusion isn't valid for college math, a decent understanding of calculus is enough for all but the most formidable hacking. So I probably won't worry to much about the errors in HS math depriving the world of the "hacker class."

    As to the issue of open text books. The university system and the people currently making large money on these things will fight an opensource version as tooth and claw as their O/S counterparts. The only advantage I can see is that their egos of university profs. will be to large too allow them to "play stupid." and foist it on others like, "...the people that made the PC fast and reliable." [Actual Microsoft Ad.]

    Given how much code you could borrow from Project Gutenbergs supporters, a distributed document checking system for an FDL text book would be easy to set up and vastly improve the quality of the work. I certainly hope this comes about.
    • The university system and the people currently making large money on these things will fight an opensource version as tooth and claw as their O/S counterparts.

      I certainly agree that the textbook publishers would fight open courseware tooth and nail, but there are a lot of professors who would support it.

      As an example, a new copy of one of the most widely-used calculus texts costs $136. (To be fair, this is a large (~1200 page) book, and can be used for 3 semesters of calculus, but I feel the price is ex
  • After a particularly bad book,
    • Electric Circuits
    by Nilsson, IIRC, where they forgot to include the appendix with the answers, I've made it a habit to check the publisher's website for corrections and errata. For that matter, you sometimes get useful things like more sample problems.

  • Schaum's aren't designed to be used as primary texts (believe me, if they were they'd cost a lot more); they're meant to serve as supplementary texts. Having seen the light I'd say skip the college algebra and take a crack at abstract and linear algebra first but that's just me...

    That all said, take a gander at DMOZ's listing of online math texts [dmoz.org]. My general experience with people publishing online math / science texts is that they're really glad when people report errata.

  • I don't know of any Math textbooks yet, Nick, but the Open Book Project site has a few Computer Science texts and an Electronics text. Check out: http://ibiblio.org/obp
  • Extrapolating my rate of progress it should be done in about three hundred years.

    Check out the FCP [nongnu.org]. The project is really at a stand still right now, but interest breeds progress.

    -Peter
  • When I was learning about molecular spectroscopy, my advisor handed me a copy of J. Steinfeld's Molecules and Radiation [amazon.com] and told me, "The best way to learn about molecular spectroscopy is to read this book and find all the errors." Indeed, knowing the book was chock full of errors, I read it more carefully than I did most textbooks, rederived all the equations myself, and learned a lot.
  • There are a huge number of textbooks in the public domain or otherwise free. Dover books publishs them. They are quite inexpensive and quite good. Several math classes at Caltech use them as their primary textbooks. Highly recommended.
  • Unfortunately that's the way it is in a lot of cases. The best thing to do is buy a late printing of a textbook, one that is in between versions. It will usually have a lot of the errors fixed.

    Just today, when I pointed out an error to my professor in a graduate solid state class, he said that "sometimes you have to be confident you have the right answer"... so there you have it.

  • Timely post (Score:4, Funny)

    by The Clockwork Troll ( 655321 ) * on Thursday May 01, 2003 @08:35PM (#5858520) Journal
    But without math, you can't hack, and if young hackers are getting hung up on stupid math mistakes made by textbook authors... well, it's obviously a case for FDL textbooks.
    So true - I can't count how many times I've been laid off because I couldn't remember how to write code to find the eccentricity of a hyperbola.
  • Lots of books (some on some very interesting topics) are found at The Assayer [theassayer.org].
  • See my sig.

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