Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
It's not an either/or. Books (good ones anyway) will give you a foundation, and depth and perspective on how we got to the state of the art that you won't get from web or journal articles. They help you understand why some roads were followed and others were abandoned. Then you catch up on what has happened since with (good) articles, and you're likely to better understand them.
This is why college courses in cutting edge fields still have textbooks.
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After reading your post, I think that I completely agree with you. A theme seems to run through your post: history (history in the sense of what is
recorded about the past) changes very little, so the audiobook to which we refer, might be excellent for giving the greatly important background and history of the study of artificial intelligence. Kudos.
It's been a while since I took a college class, but I know that things have changed a lot with textbooks, too, with the coming of the digital revolution. There are etextbooks, POD (Print On Demand) textbooks, and Open Access textbooks,
et al. that you can download immediately. But even those obviously cannot give you up-to-the-minute information! There must be a lag--it must take some time to write it, add new information to it, print it, etc.; that's obvious.
Our audio book under consideration may not (I haven't listened to it) make any claim to containing the most recent information. But, one thing that surely appears not to have changed, and that is that
professors are expected to keep up with new developments in their fields of study, and impart their knowledge of it (as needed) on a level that their students can understand). But a student in a traditional class needs to show up for classes to get the information!
). The same principle would have to hold true for those taking online classes
)
Kudos, again, for your post. It gave me a lot of food for thought!