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Book ideas



John makes a good point in his comments below. I'll set up a website soon
where everyone's contributions are organized, probably by chapter. I'd still
like to keep the conversation on the list though. Unless this threatens to
completely "take over" Phys-L, I think it will be a fun discussion.

As far as audience goes, this will be a calculus-based book aimed at science
and engineering majors. I want to focus on fundamentals and motivate
learning through introductory real world examples. I'll put the prospectus
on the website for folks who want all the gory details.

And John, I'm looking forward to your ideas when we get to fluids. I really
like your approach to explaining airplane flight in
<http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/how/>.

Bob

On 8/25/02 8:57 AM, "John S. Denker" <jsd@monmouth.com> wrote:

Hi --

If you want contributions to the book, you desperately
need a web site.

This is a big project. If the bits and pieces are spread
amongst many emails, nobody (except possibly you) will be
able to figure out what's going on.

As a particular example: You haven't yet said what is the
intended audience for the book. I'm guessing that it is a
for a college-level calculus-based course. If you mail
out that a message to that effect, that message will have
to "catch up" with all the other messages about the book.
This creates an organizational problem that has to be
solved, separately, by all N collaborators. It would be
better to solve it once-and-for-all by maintaining a
well-organized web site.

Then you just post notices about changes to the web site.

--- jsd
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