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Am I the only one who prefers blog posts, examples and wikipedia to textbooks? For anything IT related, anyway.

Textbooks are cripplingly sparse. They yak and yak and yak for a few pages on a concept you're figured out from the first sentence.

I would like a zoomable textbook. One which presents you a list of tl;dr explanations about every topic covered (one-two pages per book), but you may click on any topic and get a thorough description of it, and then I can click on any claim in that and get more specialized information and so on down to turtles.

I would like articles that way too.



You may want to check out my html5 textbook platform experiment.

http://www.bookvoid.com

It is designed around this "zoomable" principle.

Coincidentally, the "zoomable" aspect was inspired by some of Elizer Yudkowsky's posts who I believe is a founder of LessWrong.


I wish the wikipedia leads were more concise. A two sentence description of the concept in the most basic understandable language possible.

Then the next paragraph can be a more accurate lead.

The the content list; then the contents.

Your zoomable book idea is a good one. I'd prefer authority with good cites over crowd-sourced with semi-random citing.


I recommend checking out the "Simple English" wikipedia for more complex topics. It breaks those sentences down even more and is fantastic for math articles and the like.




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