this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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I bought some textbooks for university.
Ended up not using most of them.
Most computers science students are used to computers, internet and StackOverflow.
Not paper.
Here is a PDF of the book you need for this course, you may not share it and the file will self destruct the day after finals. Thanks for the $150
The younger teachers were doing something similar to this. Teachers have to follow certain sets of rules to not get fired.
It was mostly the oldest, gray-haired teachers that were requiring textbooks. Stuck in their old ways.
At least you OWN the text book and can reference it years later. That PDF scam was a real piss off
That might work in other domains other than computer sciences.
But from my experience, nobody cared about books and papers in computer science. Everyone is more comfortable with technology.
You can easily Google or find things on the internet.
The professor that taught my algorithms & data structures course said if we were going to keep one book it should be the one for that course. I followed that advice and it's the one textbook I still have. It's been 8 years since graduation and I haven't opened it once. I tend to just read Wikipedia if I need to understand a particular algorithm or data structure.
Exactly lol. If I were you, I'd try to sell it.
If it's still relevant, you could also give it to younger students.
Textbooks that are good references are great. Textbooks that are just another class and withhold the answers are garbage.
There's nothing wrong with paper books.
I never said there's something wrong with paper books.
I'm even reading one right now. Lord of Rings paper version.
But for computer science students textbooks, it's heavy, inconvenient and spacey.
The internet or even PDFs are better.
Why?
It's easier to do research, CTRL+F and copy/paste some programming code.
If you're copy pasting code you're not learning a whole lot.
You're clearly not a programmer lol
Copy pasting code is THE WORST way to learn how to program.
The best investment I made in textbooks was the class that wanted a Schaum's Outline book, $15 brand new and still a book I use for occasional linear algebra reference.
I found this in my first and second year so I stopped buying them.
Half the time it was just "recommended reading" and the book wasn't even used in class.
Yep, not gonna shell out $120 per book for "recommend reading"