Although the focus with this book is with the fully interactive figures, I'm more impressed that ALL of the book is available for free.
I'm constantly seeing more people coming out with books for free or just a passive donation link. This makes me immensely happy seeing as how they're leveraging the available free resources (Latex, CC-BY-SA content, free software for graphics) to make more resources available for free.
Open software is one thing, but a book is much more permanent in my opinion. A book like this will never go 'stale' or old like software does. We only need handful of good books for every topic out there at which point we can basically not buy books anymore. For many topics, I hardly have to consider buying a book since I can just use a free book offered by a professor. And watch course lectures.
What I want to say is this: Please write more for free. It doesn't matter if there is not much interest in what you are writing. It will help you too!
> Although the focus with this book is with the fully interactive figures, I'm more impressed that ALL of the book is available for free.
That was exactly my first thought. "Wait a minute, this is an entire textbook, with all the work, and the prior experience, hiding in plain site behind cool interactivity."
Well, now that I think about it, the software going 'stale' depends on the domain.
You can write a networking stack in C adhering to a protocol and be done with it, while code for the new $COOL_WEB_APP might go out of mainstream use by the time you're done writing the networking stack.
I don't think most books, especially math and science ones go stale. A poorly written book is just that; a poorly written book. It's bad from the beginning
I'm constantly seeing more people coming out with books for free or just a passive donation link. This makes me immensely happy seeing as how they're leveraging the available free resources (Latex, CC-BY-SA content, free software for graphics) to make more resources available for free.
Open software is one thing, but a book is much more permanent in my opinion. A book like this will never go 'stale' or old like software does. We only need handful of good books for every topic out there at which point we can basically not buy books anymore. For many topics, I hardly have to consider buying a book since I can just use a free book offered by a professor. And watch course lectures.
What I want to say is this: Please write more for free. It doesn't matter if there is not much interest in what you are writing. It will help you too!