Flashes of Panic

Now I’m really on the other side of the coin. I’m the TA for Professor Σ’s Programming Languages course in all but formal assignment. Since he’s essentially rewriting the course, we’re starting already. (Two weeks until classes start. I figure if department politics pushes me to another course, at least someone will benefit from the work. I have a higher good-karma-per-semester rate than nearly anyone else in the department.)

My current task: suggest a good textbook. (“No text” is also a valid suggestion.) With that, off I go into the mirror image of the world I inhabited two years ago.

What did they use at other universities when they taught this course recently? (How close is their syllabus to what we have in mind?) Is the text centered on one or two languages, or is it feature based? (I’m making gross generalizations already.) Is it being used because it’s good, or because the professor wrote it? (Three cases in today’s survey. Note that these two cases aren’t mutually exclusive. Put another way, it’s an OR, not an XOR.)

I haven’t even started on the book sites themselves—the class of pages I used to produce, albeit from different publishers—to start answering the more serious questions. What do they cover? In what depth and order? How new are they? And honestly, it has to be asked: how much do they cost? There’s one book, relatively widely used in today’s survey, which is available free online. (Actually, three of them are; this is the only one I saw which appears to be used outside the author’s own university.) Is it being “relatively widely used” because it’s good, or because it’s free? How do I find out?

I have to remember I’m not the one making the decisions. Or at least, I won’t be the one responsible for the decisions that get made.

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