I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00

Re:I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00 by deathanatos on Saturday May 18, 2019 @05:08PM (#19949722)

I bought an international edition of a text in college because it was priced significantly cheaper. And indeed, it had all the same problems, but they had been re-arranged, so when the professor assigned problems "5-15", I needed to know the mapping from the US 5-15 to the international version's numbers. Which, by quickly thumbing through another student's copy, I could generate pretty rapidly, but boy was that annoying. (I might have reconsidered purchasing the international edition had this been disclosed at the time of sale…)

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Re:I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00 by WrtCdEvrydy on Saturday May 18, 2019 @06:14PM (#19950024)

We had a professor that kept mappings for 2-3 versions behind and basically allowed you to buy the used book on Amazon for about $12 compared to $200 for the new one.

It's these little things that make your professors stand out.

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Re:I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00 by black6 on Sunday May 19, 2019 @08:29AM (#19952995)

> It's these little things that make your professors stand out

The calculus text at my university was a “custom” edition that came unbound and shrink-wrapped and still cost as much as a regular new text. My calculus IV professor said many times over the first week: “Do not take your copy down to the document shop on Jackson avenue and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends, because that would be illegal. I say again, I cannot advise you take your copy down to the document shop on Jackson Avenue next to Pizza Hut and run off copies of the relevant chapters for your friends because that is IP theft and illegal.”

Fantastic professor—I really that semester because of him.

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Re:I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00 by meddlepal on Saturday May 18, 2019 @10:53PM (#19951145)

I was not a CS major but I had a number of friends that were CS majors and one of the courses used a book written by the professor, who is also the department head. The book cost like $200-$300. It was a shitty rewrite of the Sun Java documentation with a few added exercises and some reworded bits.

Fucking racket. Also something something cheating and plagiarism is bad unless you're the head of an academic department.

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Re:I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00 by andrepd on Saturday May 18, 2019 @07:15PM (#19950254)

>$200 for a textbook with borderline extorsion sale tactics

That's the moment I fire up libgen

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Re:I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00 by WrtCdEvrydy on Monday May 20, 2019 @07:15PM (#19966229)

b-ok.cc?

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