ictdchick: information technology, healthcare, and africa » Teaching http://ictdchick.com/blog musings and meanderings of a multi-disciplinary researcher learning about information technology use in developing regions Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:28:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 A Socially-Responsible Amazon/Textbooks for MUST http://ictdchick.com/blog/2009/02/01/textbooks-for-must/ http://ictdchick.com/blog/2009/02/01/textbooks-for-must/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:43:07 +0000 melissa http://ictdchick.com/blog/2009/02/01/a-socially-responsible-amazontexbooks-for-mbarara/ My friend Ben pointed out Better World Books,  an online bookstore that ships books worldwide for only $3.97! I did a bit of poking around, and realized that not only do they have crazy low shipping prices, but somehow their proceeds go to support literacy – specifically through World Fund, Books for Africa, Room to Read, NCFL, and Invisible Children. They get donations of books through various organizations – mostly donation drives at universities and libraries, and rescue perfectly readable books from landfills, either donating them or selling them online. Cool, huh?

I was sort of hoping when I looked that they were a site that donated textbooks – so that I could get some textbooks for the Object-Oriented Programming class I’m teaching at Mbarara University of Science and Technology this year. I wanted to use Head First Java (which you can get from BWB for $32), or maybe Deitel and Deitel’s Java How to Program (available in various editions from BWB) at least as a reference, but unfortunately they don’t have either in their libraries (the library actually has a lot of copies of C++ How to Program and C How to Program), and I’m sure the students can’t afford to buy the books.  Alas even if they could I didn’t even know what class I was teaching until a few weeks ago, so it’s not like the books would be shipped on time. There are a bunch of other textbooks in the library – but unfortunately there’s about 20 books for my class of 208 students to share. I’m hoping they’ll cope with the online resources (e.g. the Java Tutorial) and my lecture notes, but that puts a lot of pressure on my lecture notes and very unreliable Internet connection.  I just gave my first lecture today, which was followed by lots of frantic copying of my slides to some very highly infected usb-keys.  Thank goodness I have an apple laptop. Whew. Sigh.

Anyone want to donate an electronic copy of a decent OOP-Java textbook?

Actually, lots of people here are asking me for advice on web development and some systems administration too.  I think we’d be happy to take donations of any textbooks, electronic or otherwise.

You can ship books to me here at the Institute of Computer Science:

Institute of Computer Science c/o Melissa Ho
Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST),
P.O. Box 1410
Tel: +25648520394 / +25648521373
Mbarara, Uganda

If you decide to ship anything else to me, umm, like computers (!!) let me know and I can give you an address in Kampala, which might be more secure/faster. =)

p.s. For my personal use, I’m perfectly happy to just buy and download pdfs of books from O’reilly or elsewhere and read them on my Sony Reader.  It’s a little slow sometimes, but I get instant gratification (relatively, compared to the post) and remarkably readable. And I can carry them home with me. But if you send me a physical book I’ll leave them here for the library.

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