Text books

[mehilaainen]

At our school we have mostly text books of American authors and editions. I have chance to compare them with Russian text books and European. Of course American editions have good and bad sides as any other editions.The good thing that I like about them is citing a lot of examples from real reality, meaning that the theory is usually linked to the

Comments

[flamingspear]

Usually a new edition is printed in the USA because something has changed. I imagine that in the USSR, if something worked (a television set, or car for example), the factories would just keep making that same one, until it really became obsolete. In the USA, every year products, tools, and other goods were updated as new technology was discovered. Sometimes the changes were un-popular, and would be phased out quickly, meaning once again new information and textbooks.

If we look at the world of computers, we went from Machine language to BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, QBASIC, C, C+, C++, GNU, JAVA, HTML, PYTHON, etc. Each of these had to be taught, which means a textbook. Each of these languages was updated several times, which means new textbooks for each edition.

If we look at the hardware side of computers, I remember when there was no certification. You either knew how to fix a computer through experience, or you called someone. Most of the time the person you called to repair your computer knew less about it than you did. Then A+ Certification came along, which meant classes and textbooks. The coarse had a fatal flaw: all the questions and answers were the same on every test (it was a multiple choice test). This meant if you memorized the answers, you could pass the test and still not know what you were doing. So they had to create a new Certification test with new textbooks... =))