How "canonical" are these textbooks w.r.t. the courses they're used in?
I'm asking because I was fortunate enough that my uni's CS school was textbook-less (yes, we had reading-lists, but those aren't textbooks): any and all required-reading articles were solely distributed as PDFs or plaintext from a decades-old (yet web-accessible!) NFS share that was historically used for this sort-of-thing. (I assume everything was correctly licensed, this was/is a UK redbrick so I assume this was all legit) - other typical textbook content like homework questions (...and solutions) was instead something always credited to the TA (or maybe the prof if you're lucky).
Was I alone? Is CS unique is not needing students to have textbooks... let alone textbooks that the publishers argue should expire or be exclusive?
In a CS undergrad I know the "actual-coding" course material always changes (e.g. language of instruction, C first vs OOP first vs FP first, etc) so any textbook that covers that will be obsolete overnight - a good uni won't want to be seen teaching obsolete things - and anyway, the current _For Dummies_ book might (and if O'Rielly, then will) end-up as a better learning-resource than any official textbook could ever be - as for the rest of a CS undergrad: CS theory and SE and project management: yes, this is where I expect you'll find textbooks, but in my uni's course all the required material was in that NFS share: so anything like a section from a textbook was all neatly cut-out and in a PDF on that NFS share in a subdirectory for whatever year and course we were on. And then I graduated. And 3 months since then I got my green-card working for a FANGMA (...so I didn't just go to a dodgy uni and they didn't rip me off and I'm legit now? right? I still have imposter syndrome).
...so that's my personal experience: textbooks just weren't necessary for students to buy and maintain and sell-on or re-use as expensive monitor stands. So (and excluding law and medicine), why do so many other universities and courses support a closed and inefficient market based on the exclusivity of knowledge by making their students personally buy specific textbooks for even a single course?
(Asking friends and people I know who did go through a textbook-heavy degree (even before single-use book codes) said the campus library would never have enough of the textbook to loan so they'd always have to buy them, but still it was common to end-up only reading a few sections and nothing close to the whole textbook).
I'm asking because I was fortunate enough that my uni's CS school was textbook-less (yes, we had reading-lists, but those aren't textbooks): any and all required-reading articles were solely distributed as PDFs or plaintext from a decades-old (yet web-accessible!) NFS share that was historically used for this sort-of-thing. (I assume everything was correctly licensed, this was/is a UK redbrick so I assume this was all legit) - other typical textbook content like homework questions (...and solutions) was instead something always credited to the TA (or maybe the prof if you're lucky).
Was I alone? Is CS unique is not needing students to have textbooks... let alone textbooks that the publishers argue should expire or be exclusive?
In a CS undergrad I know the "actual-coding" course material always changes (e.g. language of instruction, C first vs OOP first vs FP first, etc) so any textbook that covers that will be obsolete overnight - a good uni won't want to be seen teaching obsolete things - and anyway, the current _For Dummies_ book might (and if O'Rielly, then will) end-up as a better learning-resource than any official textbook could ever be - as for the rest of a CS undergrad: CS theory and SE and project management: yes, this is where I expect you'll find textbooks, but in my uni's course all the required material was in that NFS share: so anything like a section from a textbook was all neatly cut-out and in a PDF on that NFS share in a subdirectory for whatever year and course we were on. And then I graduated. And 3 months since then I got my green-card working for a FANGMA (...so I didn't just go to a dodgy uni and they didn't rip me off and I'm legit now? right? I still have imposter syndrome).
...so that's my personal experience: textbooks just weren't necessary for students to buy and maintain and sell-on or re-use as expensive monitor stands. So (and excluding law and medicine), why do so many other universities and courses support a closed and inefficient market based on the exclusivity of knowledge by making their students personally buy specific textbooks for even a single course?
(Asking friends and people I know who did go through a textbook-heavy degree (even before single-use book codes) said the campus library would never have enough of the textbook to loan so they'd always have to buy them, but still it was common to end-up only reading a few sections and nothing close to the whole textbook).