Book Naming Conventions
I discovered this little piece of wisdom while visiting Aaron Krowne’s webpage, looking to see how his Noosphere CMS handles the displaying of LaTeX code. That led me to this guy’s site, where he has posted the LaTeX code, and diagram code for his open source math book, along with the book itself in several convenient formats. What more could you want? Anyhow, this is from the introduction to the book, which is just as untraditional as the idea of an open source book (which has 2317 pages, at least in the display edition, but still, that is a lot!).
The title is only making light of naming conventions in the sciences and is not an insult to engineers. If you want to
learn about some mathematical subject, look for books with ?Introduction? or ?Elementary? in the title. If it is an
?Intermediate? text it will be incomprehensible. If it is ?Advanced? then not only will it be incomprehensible, it will
have low production qualities, i.e. a crappy typewriter font, no graphics and no examples. There is an exception to this
rule: When the title also contains the word ?Scientists? or ?Engineers? the advanced book may be quite suitable for
actually learning the material.
Excuse the extraneous crap– I ripped the text from the PDF file. Which is legal, in this case, although I freely admit I would have done it even if it wasn’t legal.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Installing TeTeX latex packages (2/28/2005)
- Quick break (3/14/2003)
- Some thoughts on shareware (7/14/2007)