Announcing Calculus and SAGE Update Project

[Charles Ross]

I starting an update to Differential Calculus and SAGE. Prof. Joyner kindly directed me here suggesting that announcing the project might result in assistance. I plan to move forward with this alone if necessary, but could certainly use assistance.

I'm a professional programmer but only an amateur mathematician and educator. I originally came across both the book and SAGE in order to refresh my own education in anticipation of my son's study of calculus. While the book has proven extremely useful I've noticed that the TeX source and the HTML and PDF outputs have numerous differences, as well as typos and errors or lack of standardization in notation and perhaps obsolete SAGE syntax. I plan to correct that even though I'm at the beginning of my learning curve with both TeX and SAGE.

I've begun a Github repository for the project at https://github.com/chivalry/differential-calculus-and-sage (only having the Readme so far). I have no schedule in mind, and the list of goals that you'll find in the Readme there is so far nebulous and will certainly change. My only hope is to complete a first version before my son's calculus studies begin next year.

If you're interested in joining this project, please contact me at chiv...@mac.com or, having an account on Github, request to be added as a contributor. Any and all are welcome in absolutely whatever capacity you might with to offer.

Thanks,

Chuck Ross

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Chuck,

If the following are important for your project,

* Consistency between PDF and HTML versions
* Standard notation
* Easy-to-navigate HTML version
* Automated testing of Sage code
* Eventual no-effort versions for the Sage Notebook and Sage Math Cloud
* Avoiding a lot of LaTeX idiosyncracies

then you might want to be an early adopter of MathBook XML for authoring your
project. There are some experienced folks (including myself) on the Google
Group who can help you over the rough patches.

http://mathbook.pugetsound.edu/

Rob

On 02/18/2015 03:51 PM, Charles Ross wrote:
> I starting an update to Differential Calculus and SAGE

> <http://wdjoyner.com/teach/calc1-sage/>. Prof. Joyner kindly directed me here

> suggesting that announcing the project might result in assistance. I plan to
> move forward with this alone if necessary, but could certainly use assistance.
>
> I'm a professional programmer but only an amateur mathematician and educator. I
> originally came across both the book and SAGE in order to refresh my own
> education in anticipation of my son's study of calculus. While the book has
> proven extremely useful I've noticed that the TeX source and the HTML and PDF
> outputs have numerous differences, as well as typos and errors or lack of
> standardization in notation and perhaps obsolete SAGE syntax. I plan to correct
> that even though I'm at the beginning of my learning curve with both TeX and SAGE.
>
> I've begun a Github repository for the project at
> https://github.com/chivalry/differential-calculus-and-sage (only having the
> Readme so far). I have no schedule in mind, and the list of goals that you'll
> find in the Readme there is so far nebulous and will certainly change. My only
> hope is to complete a first version before my son's calculus studies begin next
> year.
>
> If you're interested in joining this project, please contact me at

> chiv...@mac.com <mailto:chiv...@mac.com> or, having an account on Github,

> request to be added as a contributor. Any and all are welcome in absolutely
> whatever capacity you might with to offer.
>
> Thanks,
> Chuck Ross
>

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[kcrisman]

   * Consistency between PDF and HTML versions
   * Standard notation
   * Easy-to-navigate HTML version
   * Automated testing of Sage code
   * Eventual no-effort versions for the Sage Notebook and Sage Math Cloud
   * Avoiding a lot of LaTeX idiosyncracies

then you might want to be an early adopter of MathBook XML for authoring your
project.  There are some experienced folks (including myself) on the Google
Group who can help you over the rough patches.

This is exactly what I was also going to recommend, esp. because David Farmer's LaTeX translator may help with the first pass of a conversion. 

[David Farmer]

I converted the LaTeX source to this HTML version, which you will find is a lot better
than the old version from latex2html:

http://sl2x.aimath.org/development/dcandsage/html/chapter1x.html

If the Sage in the book is just going to be words on a page, then having LaTeX as
the source may be adequate.  But if you want to automatically generate Sage cells
or a Sage notebook, then your best option would be to convert to Mathbook XML (MBX),
as described in Rob's post.

I have been thinking about modifying my code to convert to MBX instead of HTML,
and would consider using this calculus book as a test case.

[Charles Ross]

I've added Rob's and David's comments to the github issues database and will be looking into Mathbook before I begin development.