My soon-to-defend Ph.D. student, Theresa Migler, pointed me to the Open Textbook Initiative by AIM, with the question as to whether a similar resource exists or is in development for computer science. I am now forwarding that question to you.
The Open Textbook Initiative looks awesome. It is more than just a collection of textbooks that are available freely. The textbooks are vetted against a set of reasonable criteria, including (but not limited to):
- able to serve as the primary text in a mainstream mathematics course at the undergraduate level in U.S. colleges and universities
- have exercises
- be class-tested and have been used (and be in current use) by faculty other than the author
I think this is a great direction to go in. Peer-reviewed and peer-tested classroom resources, available freely to all. These are exactly the types of resources I limit myself to for my courses (although, it isn’t a limit of quality). Currently I use:
- Erickson’s not-a-book algorithms notes
- The Design of Approximation Algorithms by Williamson & Shmoys
- Algorithms by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou & Vazirani
All of these, I think, meet the OTI criteria. Do we have a similar group that vets open textbooks in CS?
Hm, does http://www.computingportal.org qualify? (Check “Collections”.)
There are a number of online resources for more specific ares within CS Ed though. E.g. if you want to do peer instruction you could have a look at http://www.peerinstruction4cs.org, or if you want to do process oriented guided inquiry learning you could look at http://cspogil.org.
Maybe OpenDSA qualifies as well? (http://algoviz.org/OpenDSA/)
try this question recent TCS books with drafts available online
imho john e savage models of computation is very good, free online.
Thanks for this post! Inspired by it, I will use only freely-available material for my Fall ’14 algorithms class. An additional excellent resource I have found is Kevin Wayne’s set of slides that support (primarily) the Kleinberg-Tardos book. (I like the K-T book a lot, but am waiting for the upcoming version that will be quite a bit cheaper.)
Wow! That’s great, Aravind! I am sure your students will appreciate it.