Mar
21
2006
There is no question that Drupal is growing, largely through word of mouth. Yet, go to the computer section at a well-stocked book store, and still there is precious little on the shelves about Drupal.
But breakthroughs, both large and small, are like that.
When calculus was first introduced, there were no text books on what Newton and Leibniz had discovered. The knowledge was largely word of mouth and it took one of the Bernoullis to put together a first pass book about calculus. It would be hundreds of more years before Thomas' Calculus would flood every modern scientific school of higher learning.
Part of what we are seeing is a moving target.
I once heard a graduate student put it this way,
The text books are at least a couple years behind the latest advances.
To understand what has happened in the last year, we go to the journals - which are usually six months to a year behind what is happening.
To get more recent informations, Conferences and Symposia are a place where data is a month or two to six months old.
To get what the latest is? "It's like we're sitting now," he said, "over coffee."
Today it is even faster than that grad student said. I don't wait to see him in the Student Union Building where we can chat about the cutting edge.
The cutting edge is happening all at once on the internet, just as fast as people can get the information up and moving.
Surely there is a place for a good horn book and reference manual, but you know you're in a revolutionary mode when things are happening faster than the press can report them.
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Comments
Nola Stowe writes:
I sold most of my textbooks after college!!
katherine writes:
I know how some books go out of fashion fast. "Future Shock," "The Green of America," or "In Search of Excellence," had good messages - ones which might even hold, but their examples have faded and so they are not the groundbreaking tomes they once were.
Gilbert W. Castellan's "Physical Chemistry" will quicken the pulse of few. In fact, one day while rummaging through St. Vincent DuPaul's book section, I walked off with a grocery bag of books - a special - a dollar a bag for hardbacks. In it I had Thomas' "Calculus," Tortora's "Microbiology," and several other gems, and the Castellan's book. Wow! None at the time more than two editions out of date, but spines good and not marked up inside with that horrid iridescent highlighter.
I had had a pretty poor Physical Chemistry book. Chemists all at once affectionately and irreverently - depending on the mood - call it P-Chem, pronounced "pea chem." It's that place where physicists and chemists study the same stuff - the physics of matter, elements, and molecules. But the Castellan's book buried the text from the University of Washington.
Last evening I opened Catellan and just read at random. Strange how things escape us when we are younger, and then become more clear with time.
Gilbert W. Castellan's "Physical Chemistry." Third edition. Section *19.12, page 400, "The Classical Wave Equation."
I had got through undergraduate science at what I later was to learn was one of the top ten technical schools in the United States. No wonder it was so hard! At time I felt I drinking from a fire hose. We covered a lot.
Some years later I stunned my colleagues at Hewlett-Packard because I had a grasp of Maxwell's electrodynamics. How could a mere chemist know that?
But, ah, the Classic Wave Function. It had always looked kind of odd - as my professor's eyes glazed over and he babbled on about psi, and psi* and the Hamiltonians.
Yet, there it was. Just like Peter Morris, my mathematic professor at Shepherd College (now University!), taught me, "go back to the definition."
The simple classical wave equation is actually so easy.
So some books from college aren't worth keeping - like my old P-Chem book, but sometimes they merely need to be replaced.
Thank you Dr. Castellan and thank you, especially, Dr. Morris.
Steve writes:
I came across your comments while looking for something else, but I thought you might like to know someone else out there thinks Castellan was the best text on any subject he ever had, including graduate chemistry.
I used the first edition at Ohio State in the 1960s. I don't think anything in it is out of date, merely out of fashion.