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I'm reminded of the reference book "Writing CGI Applications with Perl." In the introduction the author warned that there will be several purposeful mistakes in every chapter as an exercise to the reader to find and correct. Using this technique in a reference manual was bad enough but it made things even more difficult given that there was no key.

I got rid of the book. Tough to learn from a book that lies.

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How absurd. The best part of this learning technique is the discussion and the collaboration between students to solve the puzzle - you even learn by pointing out false positives, with someone correcting you and reinforcing that bit of information. A textbook / reference book is entirely different from a classroom - what was that author thinking?

I think that author was thinking "hmm, how can I skip a long editorial fact-checking process without looking completely unprofessional."

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