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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

For my Linear Algebra (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/), the thing that has held me back has been that the tech changes every few years. I can't keep revising something that I give away for free. In contrast, the LaTeX in which I wrote the book is 98% unchanged since the early 90's.

Perhaps the tech is settling down, I'm not sure.

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Perhaps this is a reason why there are some nicely designed apps with not-so-great content, and lots of books with legendary content: the whole ecosystem around app development isn't very friendly to the long-term process of writing a classic text.

It's also hard to focus on design, coding and content solo, and writing great, cohesive content tends to be a private endeavour. I'm not surprised to see immersivemath.com is written by a team.

I know (through fond memory!) your texts have some interactivity in hyperlinking to solutions and I found that very useful, but making it work must have taken time and been a bit of a headache. Extrapolate that to writing a webapp and it's easy to imagine you would never finish.

And yes, the words 'legendary' and 'classic' are direct compliments to you: your Lin Alg sits next to Spivak's Calculus on my bookshelf. They are both immortal.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

Wow! Your textbook looks phenomenal. Eyeballing the table of contents and a few chapters, this arrangement of material looks exactly like what I'm advocating throughout this thread. Gaussian elimination and systems of linear equations before vector spaces, a coverage of fields in tandem with vector spaces, some treatment of sets and functions in appendices, generous usage of matrices to supplement theory...

And you include solutions for your exercises? This is fantastic! Do you have any plans to write something like this for functional analysis?

Thank you, that's very kind. Working on Theory of Computation. Don't know any functional analysis, sorry.

This is great news. Please model the Theory of Computation book after your Linear Algebra book (by including full solutions). This is an excellent resource for self-learners.

Do you have a timeline for the release of the book? Would you have any interest in writing an Abstract Algebra text?

> Do you have a timeline for the release of the book?

Several years. I have a very early draft, no doubt full of errors, that I am teaching from. It is linked-to from the linear page.

> Would you have any interest in writing an Abstract Algebra text?

Sorry, no. But all my stuff is Free and you could take the .cls file, etc. Go nuts.

Thank you for your contributions. I want to echo what others have said. Thank you for providing complete solutions to your linear algebra book. This is an incredibly useful resource for self-learners.

These things take time lol, he might not even want to write any other books after that theory of computation one!

Thank you for including the solutions to the exercises. This truly is godsend. You have no idea how much it is helpful for those of who try to learn outside an educational institution.

It is very hard to feel confident in learning when I have no way to gauge if I am on the right track or not.

Thanks again.

Solving problems like this is one of the motivators for my nascent BubbleOS project — we need a stable software base that isn't upgraded every couple of years to replace known security holes with unknown ones, also introducing unknown incompatibilities. Executable code is clearly the best representation for many kinds of knowledge, but our existing systems software isn't up to the task.

Your book taught me a lot. I got stuck some of the way in (dropped out of education at 16 - kids and full time job don't offer much opportunity for the focus it deserves). It's the furthest I've progressed with this topic and helped me understand in ways other books didn't. Thank you!

It always makes it a good day when I get a note like yours. Glad it helped.

It's true that things went from embedded Java applets (or, eh, ActiveX objects, thanks Microsoft!) to embedded Flash applets to... HTML5/Canvas, but the latter does seem finally stable-ish, especially once web assembly is widespread (which it kinda is, already: https://caniuse.com/#search=wasm)

The technological endurance of LaTeX is legendary, though

Forgive me but the page says "WebAssembly or "wasm" is a new portable, size- and load-time-efficient format suitable for compilation to the web." It is the "new" part that makes me shy.

It IS newish and it is fair to be cautious of new things, but this one may stick around for awhile, as it's mostly just a modification/refinement of what Emscripten was already doing successfully https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten acting as a build target for the vast majority of C/C++ code out there, and Emscripten is not at all new. Here are some demos/examples to show what it's already accomplished: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/wiki/Porting-E...

And JavaScript itself (for better or worse) isn't going anywhere, it is literally "too big to fail" at this point.

I'm a web developer and have been following this space since the Web came out, these are just my best educated guesses. I would deem "developing with a target of HTML5/Canvas/JS/emscripten/wasm" to be future-proof for the foreseeable future (the next 10 years).

BONUS: You may already know about being able to convert LaTeX to HTML5 via JS, but just in case you haven't, this is pretty cool: https://latex.js.org/

Thanks. I was unaware of the web page. I've saved a bookmark.

I'll trade you. I perceive that the standard for conversion at this point, which you may not know about, is https://www.tug.org/tex4ht/.

(Sorry, do you know the author of the latex.js package? I would like to contact him.)

I found his email in the package information: https://github.com/michael-brade/LaTeX.js/blob/master/packag...

Your book is genius. Really. Thanks for making it free.

Thank you for your free book. Another great book is Gilbert Strang's book: Introduction to Linear Algebra. Also Boyle: Linear Algebra and its Applications.

Perhaps your free book can be used to develop some evolving tool for the student. For example: the student take a test and then the book select the best exercises and topics for that student.

Any interest in doing that? Serious question. There are some platforms such as WeBWorK http://webwork.maa.org/ that seem to me to be promising targets.

A lot of work for a null reward. So not really.

So, you want him to do lots of work for no reward! How progressive!

Thank you for your book. I applaud all sorts of free texts.

I notice that there is an option to buy your book, and perhaps there are other options to somehow get money to you. I was wondering if you felt comfortable revealing approximately how much money has come to you as a result of your (donated) labours?

I occasionally get contributions via the PayPal button on the book's web page. I use them, among other things, to fund going to conferences. I say "conferences" but really there has only been one (very, very good) conference on Inquiry-Based Learning at Westfield State, in connection with my IBL Proofs text. To be fair, the contribute button has only been up for a year-ish.

I sell hard copies on Amazon. Well, really Orthogonal Publishing L3C sells them. This is a limited-profit company that Lon Mitchell set up to publish Free texts. Naturally we round the price up rather than down so there is some money. Since Amazon's price, $21.95, is not far from the price of media, you can guess that there is not much money. I'm reluctant to quote exact numbers but the dollar amount is not much, especially per hour.

However, my school, St Michael's College, has the wisdom to give me professional credit for the work so that counts for a lot.

Thank you for letting me know. It's good to hear that St Michael's College values your work, too.

Cheers.

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