Comment by sky2224
20 days ago
> While at it, no one book contains all that you should know about a subject, if you want to know it well. Not the Feynman Lectures. Not Code Complete. Not even the Mahabharata. You always get to read more. (I'm not talking about the formal exam questions here, of course.)
Absolutely, and I'd like to clarify, I'm not expecting a single physics book to cover all there is to know about electricity and magnetism. I just mean for a particular course (where the purpose of the course is to expose me to the topic) to be centered around a book properly, in which new topics that aren't in the book aren't introduced (within reason of course)
It depends on the subject, of course. By the time someone has written a book on "programming language du jour" (say, Rust right now), and gotten it published and printed, it will be 1-2 years out of date. And students will complain that "all the information is online for free". Except, it's really hard to point at a specific website that is not in your (the professor's) control to say "everything you need is in here" when it could be taken offline tomorrow. Or reorganized and re-written in such a way that content is added or removed.
The course I think I did the best in teaching was to say "here is the textbook" (on databases) and then when a specific solution / technique came up, to point out that "this is how mysql does it", or "this one is used by postgres", etc.