Fluency with Information Technology: Skills, Concepts, and Capabilities [Paperback]

I'm just now finishing up a semester teaching a CS0 class from this text. In a nutshell, I am teaching the same course next term, and I will not use this book again. Let me add a few useful things for the reader before I explain why.

First, there are essentially two classes of texts out there for CS0 classes: (1) surveys of computer science qua science and (2) surveys of the information technology field. Snyder's book most definitely falls in the second category, although there are several chapters devoted to JavaScript.

Second, if you're going to use this text, make sure you get the online resources, especially the prepared labs and the 6-page PDF reference for JavaScript. The labs are detailed, deep and very useful, and the reference is well-organized and easy to use.

In fact, I did not have a chance to review this text before I adopted it for my course, and it was the labs (along with a solid-looking table of contents, credentials from the National Research Council, and a single 5-star review here) that convinced me to use it. I do hope this review will discourage others from doing the same.

My problem with this text is, in a word, depth. Or rather the breathtaking lack thereof. It is organized coherently enough, but time and time again throughout this term, I found the treatment of various topics in the book so shallow that I had to spend almost double time filling in enough details to make things coherent to my students.

The result was an absolutely enormous amount of work on my part, finding supplementary readings, putting extra care into lectures, writing extensive tutorial materials for the assignments, and so on. At every step of the way, I felt that I was fighting the text, rather than drawing from it.

Some of the worst habits in the book's writing include:

*_Long_, drawn-out analogies for ideas that are never given any other explanation, so that the "analogies" are completely devoid of context, and hence pointless. Invariably, such things serve only to muddy already-murky waters.

*Gross over-simplification of many concepts, so much so that it is nearly impossible for a student to develop any sense of the real-world ideas that made a technology worth adapting. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is in the chapter on encryption, which in its presentation of RSA pretends that only one public key (3, 55) is ever generated, and but then proceeds to give a "formula" for computing the private key, before devolving into the spectacular silliness of a quotation of Euler's Theorem that by this point might as well be in the original german for all the good it would do a student.

*Absolutely _awful_ problem sets. The few "exercises" that aren't just fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice review consist of short-answer problems that alternated between the trivial and the pointless, or combinations of the two. The "test banks" are no better. With almost no exceptions, they were questions I would consider insulting to a six-grader, let alone a classroom of college students.

The really strange thing about this is that the website for Snyder's own version of the course looks quite well organized and rigorous. In fact, the look of his class from that site was one of the reasons I selected this text. Some of this is the use of those lab assignments I mentioned above, which are quite nice. And Snyder's work with the NRC clearly indicates a fair amount of thought went into the design of this work.

The only explanation I can offer for the disconnect is that he has simply been unsuccessful in putting into writing some of the apparent magic of the course from which this text arose.

But the book does not pull it off, all my self-consciousness about armchair-quarterbacking aside. Good work with NRC report, but the book from that effort is still to be written.

The scope of Snyder's book is ambitious. It offers a grand sweep of teaching the basics of information technology. To a reader that will not major in this field. In other words, if this is a required text for one of your courses, then it may well be the last text in IT that some of you will ever use. Realistically, you will probably in later years have computer books, about whatever new hardware or software comes up. But those will usually be books far narrower in scope.

So there is a big responsibility here. Luckily, Snyder carries it off well. This is not a book about how to turn on your PC or Mac, or how to navigate in a windowing system. He reasonably assumes that you've already learnt this by now. This frees him to discuss higher level topics. Like just what is the World Wide Web? What are the implications of a pervasive global network of computers? Whose reach is expanding daily. Naturally, pretty early in the text, we meet the Web. An entire chapter is devoted to HTML, due to its universal importance. This chapter is fairly low level detail. Most of you won't write HTML.

Later on are perhaps broader topics. Like how to find information on the Web. This is more than just blithely typing a query into Google. He warns that there is far more to effective searching than that. You need to develop some feeling for which websites and other information sources are reliable.

If you thought HTML is low level, he goes deeper. In simple terms, he tries to explain the innards of a computer. To demystify what must surely be inexplicable to some. He also does this with algorithms.

Social issues are also extensively dealt with. The privacy you might have in an electronic world, and how this might come under attack through viruses and other malware. Or even by phishing. It is a good sign of the updated nature of this text that he gives an explanation of this recent scourge. And how you might avoid it. Though the suggestions he offers are all manual, and not programmatic. Which still exposes the unwary to phishing. But in this year 2005, that is indeed the state of the art in antiphishing.

I've used this book and the earlier edition for the last 8 quarters for a 5-credit course. Over the course of 10 weeks, it would be impossible to go any deeper. I can't imagine having time in the course to go any deeper into any of these topics. We spend 3 hours per week in lecture and 2 hours in the computer lab and this book is just right for that. Its intended audience is people who need to know about IT because of our technological society but who have no plans to work in IT. This book really demystifies that black box. IT is no longer magic and our students pick up lifelong skills, concepts, and capabilities in IT and lose their fear of computers and IT somewhere along the way.

The hardest part of the course for non-programmers is JavaScript. I supplement that part of the book and the course with tutorials at W3 Schools and I've tried various JavaScript pocket guides. This quarter, I'm trying Burdette's JavaScript PocketGuide.

This book in its very breadth provides a foundation that I don't see anywhere else. Students who have no more IT experience than using word-processing and email come out of this course building Web sites, adding JavaScript interaction to Web pages, using conditional statements in Excel spreadsheets, and building databases. Sure, it's all at the most basic level but they come away excited and confident.

I have a waiting list for this course every quarter of at least 50 students. All I can handle in my course is 150 students per quarter and I fill the course every quarter. Larry Snyder's book is doing a lot that's right! I couldn't teach this course without it!

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