November 10, 2004
Buy my book... or take another course
I will try to not cite any names in this entry. Those involved will know.
In every computer science course I ever attended, the lecturer provided his students with presentation slides or lecture notes. Sometimes we were given a password to access the directory containing the slides, or were asked for a small fee to cover the cost for printing and binding the lecture notes. In any case it had always been easy and cheap to get hold of required learning material.
This semester I'm taking a course where the professor is "gently persuading" the students to buy his own €55 book to be able to study for the exam. He does so by offering no slides, no notes and spends most of the lecture reading out his own, six-years old book. (See update below)
Maybe I'm spoilt in this respect, but I don't appreciate spending €55 on an outdated book that got a rather luke-warm reception from the Amazon reader reviews.
Since the subject matter is not quite rocket science, I figured I could maybe do without the book. At least that was what I thought until I tried to work on our latest assignment. Given a number of database tables, the task was:
Given these tables, calculate the result of query 3 from chapter 3.1.2 from <my book>.
Now, I'm certain the effort required to insert that stupid query into the assignment notes would have exhausted their resources.
All this makes me very sad, as I had always felt that computer science was promoting and rewarding self-motivated learning and the use of freely available learning material like few other disciplines.
Update: I found out that some lecture notes have been published on the course's website after all. To do your homework assignment, you still need the book though.
