Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

Thank you very much for making your textbook available.

Maybe having a separate set of problems for the online version, with solutions, would be appropriate?

I have been wondering this for all freely available textbooks: have you ever thought about turning your book into an open source project? I see you already manage issues on GitHub, but how about managing the actual content there as well?

Producing a printed book might need tighter editing than shipping software, but I feel like there are a lot of books with partially overlapping content, and I feel like self-learners would be better served by larger books that are not meant to be read end-to-end, but that are "integrated" into a larger whole.

View on HN

Yes, I have thought about making it into an open-source project, like Pat Morin did with his Open Data Structures textbook, or Boaz Barak with his Modern Complexity Theory textbook. (Both highly recommended, BTW.)

But I'm hesitant to release the LaTeX source files in their current (rather grungy) form. Too much of a control freak, I guess. Maybe for the next edition.

Also, the figures are all in a closed file format (OmniGraffle). In principle, I could convert everything to an open-source format like svg, but (0) converting everything would be hell, (1) LaTeX doesn't understand svg files directly, (2) in principle, I can connect latex to inkscape to convert svg to pdf, but the translation is always imprfect, (3) using Inkscape makes me want to tear my hair out, and (4) I'm a control freak.

And don't even talk to me about tikz.

Thanks for the answer, and the pointer to those books! I hadn't really thought about the layout challenges.

Though I think the benefit would be less about just releasing the source, though the Open Data Structures book makes a compelling case for that, but fostering collaboration on the content. The books you mention have overlapping content and my heart really wants to join them in some glorious whole :)

Maybe that's crazy, the books clearly have different styles, but I feel like writing more advanced texts as extensions to an evolving intro book would be better for self-learners than just having the books stand alone.

FYI, the link to your course materials on http://opendatastructures.org/ seems to be broken now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com