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The CS department I was in (at a small liberal arts college) often used either textbooks written by one of the professors or previous editions. The use of prev
by saryant 14y ago
The CS department I was in (at a small liberal arts college) often used either textbooks written by one of the professors or previous editions.
The use of previous editions was great. It's not like discrete math changes that much anyways so using a copy we could get off Amazon for $1.70 was a great help compared to departments asking us to spend $80-200 on a brand new book.
Several professors also wrote their own books and just tossed the PDF on their website. One professor wrote a book on Scala for intro to CS classes, another on numerical calculus, a third (no longer in use) on Java and OOP for freshman.
I'm sure this isn't the only CS department in the world with this tradition but it's one that works very well. While you certainly run in to the issue of bad professors forcing subpar work on students, if you've got profs you can trust with the job the results, IME, can be quite good and better than commercially available texts.
- jmduke 14y agoEven when professors don't recommend a previous edition, dropping from the sixth edition to the fifth edition (especially in humanities courses) will save you hundreds of dollars at the expense of usually the chapters being slightly out of order.
- loganfrederick 14y agoWhere did you go to school!?
- fqqv 14y ago> One professor wrote a book on Scala for intro to CS classes Is it publicly available ?
- saryant 14y agoIt should be on bookshelves soon but I don't know if the PDF is online publicly. If you're interested, the class schedule with lecture notes for last spring's course is here: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~mlewis/CSCI1320-S12/ http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~mlewis/CSCI1320-S12/
- patricklynch 14y ago"Hey, This college sounds familiar." Dr. Lewis' book is listed on Amazon as having a publication date of October 30, 2012. [edit: The author himself will tell you; If you're already familiar with programming basics, and just want to learn Scala, you'll be better of with Odersky's text.]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- saryant 14y agoThat's a very good point, the book really an intro to CS text that happens to use Scala. (Hey Patrick! Long time since the RCC days...)