O'Really?

July 3, 2023

Some pros and cons of using bookdown and quarto to write books

Filed under: engineering,open access,publishing — Duncan Hull @ 9:06 am
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There’s a community of people here who use the R language to get stuff done known as the R Usergroup Manchester (RUM). We meet monthly to learn from each other. At the last meetup on 29th June, I gave a joint talk with Stavrina Dimosthenous about quarto.org and its predecessor bookdown.org. Following Stravrina’s quick introduction to Quarto, I gave a lightning talk about some of the pros and cons of using bookdown to write books.

Since the talk was recorded, I’ve posted the video below, which is a lo-fi Microsoft Teams recording, which doesn’t include any of the Q&A that followed.

TL:DR; Bookdown and quarto are useful and very well documented tools for publishing books that can help you overcome some of the (many) limitations of Learning Management Systems like Blackboard. If you’re writing anything book shaped in your teaching (or elsewhere) I reckon that bookdown/quarto are good tools that are worth learning as they’ll help you to get stuff done.

Thanks Kamilla Kopec-Harding for organising and hosting the talks, a promotional poster for which, you can see below. 🙏

References

  1. Wickham, Hadley, and Garrett Grolemund. 2017. R for Data Science. O’Reilly UK Ltd. r4ds.had.co.nz.
  2. Xie, Yihui. 2017. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown.
  3. Xie, Yihui, Christophe Dervieux, and Emily Riederer. 2020. R Markdown Cookbook. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook.







May 22, 2023

Join us on Zoom to dive into online interactive textbook publishing on Monday 12th June at 2pm BST

Filed under: sigcse — Duncan Hull @ 10:41 am
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CC licensed Scuba diver from flaticon.com

The textbook has long been a mainstay of education. Although online textbooks can give students easy (and sometimes free) access to increasingly interactive resources, authors have a bewildering array of tools and publishing models to select from. The likes of asciidoctor.org, bookdown.org, leanpub.com, pretextbook.org, quarto.org, runestone.academy, zybooks.com, and many others allow instructors to publish course material freed from the constraints of printed paper, monolithic Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Join us on Monday 12th of June at 2pm BST (UTC+1) to discuss a paper describing one example: Dive Into Systems an undergraduate textbook on computer systems. We’ll be joined by one of the co-authors of the paper [1] (and corresponding textbook) Suzanne Matthews, Tia Newhall and Kevin C. Webb from the United States Military Academy at Westpoint, New York and Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. From the abstract of their paper:

This paper presents our experiences, motivations, and goals for developing Dive into Systems, a new, free, online textbook that introduces computer systems, computer organisation, and parallel computing. Our book’s topic coverage is designed to give readers a gentle and broad introduction to these important topics. It teaches the fundamentals of computer systems and architecture, introduces skills for writing efficient programs, and provides necessary background to prepare students for advanced study in computer systems topics. Our book assumes only a CS1 background of the reader and is designed to be useful to a range of courses as a primary textbook for courses that introduce computer systems topics or as an auxiliary textbook to provide systems background in other courses. Results of an evaluation from students and faculty at 18 institutions who used a beta release of our book show overwhelmingly strong support for its coverage of computer systems topics, its readability, and its availability. Chapters are reviewed and edited by external volunteers from the CS education community. Their feedback, as well as that of student and faculty users, is continuously incorporated into its online content at diveintosystems.org/book

We’ll also be discussing options for adding interactivity to textbooks, see diveintosystems.org/sigcse23. All welcome, as usual, we’ll be meeting on zoom, details at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/join-us

If there are any papers you’d like to discuss at future journal club meetings, you can nominate them at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk/papers.

References

  1. Suzanne J. Matthews, Tia Newhall and Kevin C. Webb (2021) Dive into Systems: A Free, Online Textbook for Introducing Computer Systems SIGCSE ’21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Pages 1110–1116 DOI: 10.1145/3408877.3432514

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