[BruceDeitrickPrice]

So, Rabin,
What was your verdict? These textbooks were the result of stupidity or subversion?

I had never thought about this stuff at the college level because I assumed that professors would be highly motivated to find the best books. Thus driving bad books off the market. (At lower levels, bureaucrats pick books or the teachers might not be clever enough to evaluate a book’s inner workings. So we don’t expect the best.)

But you’re suggesting a most unpleasant picture. Bad books. And professors so bad they go along with the bad books. At the college level?? Say it ain’t so.

[Ellendra]

But you’re suggesting a most unpleasant picture. Bad books. And professors so bad they go along with the bad books. At the college level?? Say it ain’t so.

Worse, the professors sometimes get kickbacks from the sale of those bad books. If they didn't write them in the first place.

[cycjec]

Too many college professors are *not* motivated to find
a good textbook, but to cobble together one of their own
and require its purchase. Not only that, but to require
an updated edition every year or so. It’s truism especially
in Computer Science classes: don’t trust a textbook written
by the teacher. There are indeed exceptions, e.g. Patt
and Patel’s Introduction to Computing Systems. But the
contrary is too common. I was unaware of this at one time
but an upper classman’s dismay at the contents of an
introductory calculus book, which shall be unmentioned,
clued me in. Later I bought, unrequired, a text on Calculus
by one Michael Spivak which I simply liked. (Not cheap either,
this was years ago too.)