I bought some university textbooks for university.
Ended up not using most of them.
Most computers science student are used to computers, internet and StackOverflow.
Not paper.
Textbooks that are good references are great. Textbooks that are just another class and withhold the answers are garbage.
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.
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.
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
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”
- Use Anna’s Archives
- Wikipedia Library
- Wosonhj
God bless this professor. Piracy is a victimless crime!
Piracy is a victimless crime, most of the time.
Aaar, matey.
The name of my Plex server has been “The Pirate’s Booty” for about a decade 😂
Like punching someone in the dark!
J/K, I have a pavlovian response to the phrase “victimless crime”
Asus had some different ideas about libgen.rs 😯
Yo control your router lol (freshtomato or openwrt or something might be good options)
Seconding the recommendation for OpenWRT - I’ve been using it for years on my routers.
It’s running Merlin, works pretty well. Then again, all it does is NAT and DHCP (and apparently the parent control thing)
I loved AsusWRT-Merlin back when I used an Asus router.
To be fair it might actually be possible to find smut there.
You’re probably correct. It’s the Internet. The Internet is for porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It is one of the rules I think, the 34th?
Fuck Pearson
That professor is legendary
I have had uni professors sign books to make sure people actually bought new books and not used ones (he wrote them); unfortunately for him i had access to toluene to get pen ink off; did the same to all of my peers; Fuck those kind of professors
Do what happened if you bring a book to class already signed?
He threatened you to either buy a new book or he would make your uni career hell, one of my mates did it, at the last exam he sent him back 5 times, the last time he went to take the exam the coordiator said “what else have you got to ask to him; he told you everything in your course; [insert name] give me the paper” he signed the paper and sent him off; the prof. Still gave him only 60/100.
I still want to slap that piece of shit.
After that i taught other people in the uni to do that; he tried to mitigate by writing over the printed title of the book; hoping that any tampering would be evident; toluene didn’t touch the toner, so it didn’t work
Edit: grammar mistake (thanks mac)
Do Italian professors know their students’ names? Over here, two countries to the North, no professor knows anything about their students.
If you mean Germany: Depends. At my smaller university quite a few professors knew my name and others had something I would consider a friendship.
hi 👋
just fyi:
“teach” is one of those words in English that has a different suffix for it’s past-tense: it is “taught”.
Eg. “They taught me to sew.”
“teached” is improper.Note: not to be confused with “taut” which is pronounced the same.
:)
Thank you for pointing out a mistake in a very polite way while being informative. You deserve an applesauce for making a better internet 👏.
I had originally wrote taught but i confused it with “pulling something tight” so i went with what would get the point across even if it was wrong.
Edit: fixed it now
No judgment, I think its interesting the little high-stakes decisions we make like this though.
“Oh no which spelling is it? Is there time to search it up? Oh no my train of thought is fading! Send send send!”
Sounds like a pos.
Also that sounds very illegal, no complaints have been filed or anything?
Here in italy no one gives a quater of a fuck about that kind of shit. Good thing is that the same can be said when after the last exams he always needs to call a tow truck since he won’t have tires, not even cameras were able to stop them, and i’m quite sure other professors turn a blind eye to them since they also hate him.
I knew you were italian as soon as I read that lol. Basically my uni life too
That should be illegal. If not illegal, then worthy of a random thug stabbing.
Buy/collect used books off students after they finish the course… Remove the ink, resell undercutting him by a ton and make a huge profit!
Nah I’m fine with spreading how to remove the sign, there are already enough people capitalizing on education here
Time to sell toluene! ~taps temple~
What an absolute buffoon.
Side note: to anyone looking to follow this method, please try to limit the amount of toluene you are exposed to by wearing gloves and working in a well ventilated space. It can do dirty shit to your nervous system and I’ve seen chemists start to experience them from relatively little exposure to the fumes.
In general if you can get a respirator or at least an n95 mask if you still have them from covid; also make tries on an old book before going on the good one, at least if you mess up it isn’t another hole punched in your wallet
A respirator with an organic vapor trap will work, but an N95 will do essentially nothing for chemical vapors besides give you a false sense of safety.
If you have nothing, do your work outside and don’t work with your face directly over areas with the toluene.
Sites like that saved me thousands getting my psych degree. God bless professors like this. Also the ones who were like, “the new edition of the book you need for this semester is $500, but you can get the previous edition for $5 at this site. Here’s copies of the pages that were changed.” or “I photocopied every page you need for this semester from the book for all of you.”
The California Community College I went to allowed you to filter classes in the schedule by whether they offered ZTC - Zero Textbook Cost or OER - Open Educational Resource.
A professor of mine sent me a similar email when I said I was having trouble accessing some journals through the University library portal:
“One should definitely not use Sci-hub, if you catch my drift.”
Too bad it doesn’t have the latest papers. annas-archive is supposed to be growing that database, though.
based professor
I had a professor who kept all the materials from the books that he wrote on his website. He was cool with students printing the html pages and bringing it to class.
My fighting my instinct to say * Hello. Based department? *
I once had a class where, day one, the professor said something like, “If you don’t want to buy the book, that’s fine with me. I can’t tell you where to find a copy, but maybe one of your classmates can.” Someone raised their hand and started rattling off a few useful websites.
My Analysis professor once did basically the same thing in class. She said that we should never go to these websites, since they were illegal. Based lady.
I often usually post the chapters we use for my classes in case students haven’t bought the book yet. I also have a hard $60 limit for books that I use.
