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I personally work with one of the authors of this book (Malik). He has mentioned that the book optimizes simplicity and brevity, and that when the authors were
by seveibar 10y ago
I personally work with one of the authors of this book (Malik). He has mentioned that the book optimizes simplicity and brevity, and that when the authors were writing the book they constrained themselves to an exact number of pages to force themselves to make decisions on what was important or unimportant.
Another interesting tactic they employed was an indicator on the page that the reader could skip ahead to another page (usually before a challenging proof) without losing the chapter's main concepts.
- sitkack 10y agoThat is excellent. Do the authors have any articles about their process? Sounds like something that should be replicated in other educational material. Textbooks have gone off the rails in terms of price (high), information density (low) precisely because the goal is profit and not education.
- seveibar 10y agoI don't know of any articles they've written about the process, they do maintain a forum where they post extensions to the book (on things that change often, e.g. neural networks) for free. I agree, though I do think that professors evaluate each textbook to make sure it has the information they'd like to teach within it so the issue becomes more of a professors preference- should they provide a reference textbook or a book that perfectly matches their course. In the case of Malik, (I believe) he writes books to fit how he thinks the material should be learned then teaches the courses to match the books. Attending the class would usually give answers to some of the example problems and go through the concepts.