I had a stats professor who told us to not buy the book. He would print out hand outs and gave them to us every class. He was super nice. One time a girl brought her bunny to class because she had to give it medicine on a schedule and he made her do show and tell lol.
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.
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”
Textbooks that are good references are great. Textbooks that are just another class and withhold the answers are garbage.
Asus had some different ideas about libgen.rs 😯
Yo control your router lol (freshtomato or openwrt or something might be good options)
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.
Seconding the recommendation for OpenWRT - I’ve been using it for years on my routers.
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
It is one of the rules I think, the 34th?
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.
God bless this professor. Piracy is a victimless crime!
Like punching someone in the dark!
J/K, I have a pavlovian response to the phrase “victimless crime”
Aaar, matey.
The name of my Plex server has been “The Pirate’s Booty” for about a decade 😂
Piracy is a victimless crime, most of the time.
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.
This reminds me of when Weird Al told Canadian (or maybe Australian?) fans who wanted to watch his movie, “there’s Very Probably No way to do this. I know you probably have a TORRENT of questions, but I don’t have time to answer them right now.”
Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge To break international copyright law By downloading MP3’s from file sharing sites Like Morpheus or Grokster or LimeWire or KaZaA
Our profit margin demands you buy over-priced books from our shop
College material monopolies should be illegal, just like all other monopolies. Want to give students an education in the real world? Let the free market determine textbook prices.
I really think Khan Academy should publish a textbook that everyone can use. Cheap or free, doesn’t change every year, allowed to print out yourself.
Isn’t one of the Gates kids doing some educational reform?
I don’t think the problem is the availability, it’s probably the adoption. But I’m not in higher ed.
I see some profs trying to choose good books, but they don’t seem to be able. But I’m also not in higher ed.
Respect.
I love how he doesn’t even bother trying to consistently maintain the facade. It’s a *Chef’s Kiss
Perfect professor fr
That professor is legendary
Fuck Pearson
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
You know what I also hate? When professors take your phone while in class. I had a professor that did that back in my days of gender studies college and he saw nudes of my they/them girlfriend at the time. Mannn it was an awkward rest of the class and he didn’t tell anyone, but I really showed him, ended up taking the day off next day and nailed his wife. Dude never found out or anything, turns out her wife has had countless orgies with several other guys while he’s busy at school teaching students. Still never confirmed whether he found out or not.
Overall, lost my train of thought, in response to your comment they do it to be sure you have the most recent information in the book, don’t see an issue tbh.
The specific case here was the professor had a financial stake in new books being sold.
I do agree updated editions with new information could be important, but again when theres a financial incentive to sell new books, the obvious lean will be towards making new versions even if there is no new information.
Since the books can be required, they should be required to show proof they have substantially added to their edition or else relegate it to a minor revision (maybe adding sub-editions like 1.0, 1.1, 1.2; where you only need the first number to be current). Right now its a whole lot of, “Trust us you need this book and the only pre-owned versions are out of date”.
As a side thought, this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if they use the book costs to weed out those that will not allow themselves to be abused to that degree. This would leave only those who would conform to their leader/manager/teacher and are less likely to try to change the system.
Version 3 is ToTaLlY different from v2, i switched all the chapters around
Cue someone creating a script to convert the new chapters to the old ones!
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.
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 instruction here
Time to sell toluene! ~taps temple~
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 teached 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
Sounds like a pos.
Also that sounds very illegal, no complaints have been filled 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
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!”
That should be illegal. If not illegal, then worthy of a random thug stabbing.
What an absolute buffoon.
A creative way to tell a student how to download a free book while telling them “not to”. The professor probably just wants to teach and is as tired of the university bullshit as the students.
