Those Damn Text Books!

I have a lot of problems (read: HEAPS) with the textbooks I’m forced to read at uni. Most of the problem does not even have anything to do with money (even though it is a lot of money). I’m just annoyed at the waste of it all.

My physics text book is kingsize, the damn thing could be a murder weapon. It came with an exercise book, 500 pages of problems to solve. Very cool, right? Gives me practice. Problem? The solutions weren’t there! Whats the point of having 500 pages of problems to go through if you’ll never know you’re right or wrong? The solutions are apparently on the instructor edition CD in PDF format.

Why not bundle it with the student book? Were not a bunch of high schoolers, this book is for university, if we cheat we’ll fail the exam, were only ever cheating ourselves. Why deprive the smart kids for the sake of the few dumb?

The lack of any CD’s for my other books is also disturbing, back in highschool all my textbooks had companion CD’s with the entire book in PDF format, now that I’m doing computer science, second year, at university I have to flip through two thousand pages to find one simple paragraph.

Of course there is the ‘companion website’ thing for the physics textbook, which doesn’t have anything of any use, just a bunch of java applets.

In other news I plan on killing the publisher of my hardback ‘Physics for Scientists and Engineers’ in a very ironic way.