[TOS] Teaching materials, or textbook?

[tridge at samba.org]

Hi Chris,

 > For me and my teaching style, individual teaching resources are much
 > more useful than a text, because I tend to mix and match resources and
 > to adjust the mix as a course evolves (and man, there are few courses
 > that evolve as quickly and steadily as those on Open Source). In fact, I
 > tend to treat a textbook as a mixable resource too, and intermix pieces
 > (readings, exercies) from the text with other resources rather than have
 > the students work through the text linearly.

This is one of the things that attracted me to making a book available
via cnx.org. It allows you to mix and match pieces of material
(chapters) to make a new book, then you can print on demand the book
if you want to (with surprisingly low printing costs).

So I was imagining we'd have the chapters of a "mainline" FOSS
development textbook as a standard collection, but some lecturers may
decide to mix in different chapters for their own course.

There is no reason it could not also be offered as an O'Reilly book,
as long as O'Reilly didn't want any sort of exclusive rights.

Cheers, Tridge