Free textbooks software for linux

Used Textbook Database provides a database for listing used textbooks.

Used Textbook Database is a Web-based textbook database that lets users to create an account and list their used textbooks or books.

It is very modular and customizable and allows for easy integration into an existing Web site.

The Visualization ToolKit (VTK) is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization used by thousands of researchers and developers around the world. Visualization Toolkit consists of a C++ class library, and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python.
Professional support and products for VTK are provided by Kitware, Inc. VTK supports a wide variety of visualization algorithms including scalar, vector, tensor, texture, and volumetric methods; and advanced modeling techniques such as implicit modelling, polygon reduction, mesh smoothing, cutting, contouring, and Delaunay triangulation. In addition, dozens of imaging algorithms have been directly integrated to allow the user to mix 2D imaging / 3D graphics algorithms and data.
The design and implementation of the library has been strongly influenced by object-oriented principles. VTK has been installed and tested on nearly every Unix-based platform, PCs (Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP), and Mac OSX Jaguar or later.
Many resources exist to help you utilize the full potential of VTK in your application area. These resources include:
Mailing List: Over 1900 users are subscribed to this list. A great place to post questions, and search for answers.
VTK Textbook: The Visualization Toolkit, An Object-Oriented Approach To 3D Graphics, 3rd edition, ISBN 1-930934-12-2, now published by Kitware. This is a great book to read if you want to learn the details of the visualization algorithms and data structures. The book is often used as a college text in visualization and graphics courses.
VTK Users Guide: The Visualization Toolkit Users Guide, ISBN 1-930934-13-0, published by Kitware. This is the book to get if you want to learn how to install and use VTK.
ParaView Guide: The ParaView Guide, ISBN 1-930934-14-9, published by Kitware. ParaView is a turn-key visualization system build on top of VTK, and makes VTK easier to use with an interactive, point and click interface. ParaView also supports supercomputing applications, including tiled display and distributed parallel processing.
CMake: Mastering CMake, ISBN 1-930934-11-4, published by Kitware. CMake is the premier, cross-platform build system used to compile and link VTK. A useful book if you want to use VTK in your projects.
Support: A variety of support options are available ranging from the single point-of-contact Professional Subscription to get you up and running, to custom Site Support to help you develop your next product with VTK.
Enhancements:
- Many bugs were fixed, including fixes for memory leaks, array bounds errors, and stack overflows.

IMathAS project is a Web-based math testing and homework system.
IMathAS (Internet Mathematics Assessment System) is a Web-based math testing and homework system.
It is a light course/learning management system and testing system, similar to and inspired by WebWork and WIMS, and similar to textbook-bundled systems like iLrn and MathXL.
It requires a browser with MathML and SVG support such as Firefox 1.5 or IE6 with plugins.
Main features:
- Math: The system was designed for Math assessment; no effort was made for the system to be multi-purpose.
- Sharing: The system was setup to encourage sharing of questions within a system and outside. Questions are grouped into question libraries, and are not tied directly to a specific assessment. Unless marked Private, questions can be used by anyone on the system, or used as a template for writing new questions. Export and Import allows the sharing of question sets between systems. Also, macro libraries allow for the expansion of IMathASs question language. Users with expertise in a field can develop macro extensions, and share them with other users.
- Ease of Install: The system uses standard PHP and MySQL. It requires no special compilation options or installation of external programs
- Display:
- Rich Math and Graph display, using standards-based MathML and SVG, powered by Peter Jipsens ASCIIsvg and ASCIIMathML
- Rich Text Editor with built-in Math and Graph support for text items displayed in a course
- Alternate display options for screenreaders and browsers without needed support
- Assessment:
- Question types including:
- Functions, with answers like "sin(x)"
- Numbers, compared to a given tolerance
- Calculated Numbers, like 5/3 or 2^5
- Multiple-Choice
- Multiple-Answer
- Matching
- String
- Numerical Matrix
- Calculated Matrix
- Multipart
- Multiple display options and assessment settings, including an option for practice sets, and due date exceptions for individual students
- Algorithmically generated questions, with a relatively simple-to-use question language (loosely based on PHP) with many built-in randomizers and display macros
- Expandable question language, by installing additional macros
- Other Course Features
- Post text items, uploaded files, or web links to the classroom
- Basic Discussion Forums
- Administration:
- Flexible administration: IMathAS can be centrally administered, or teachers can be given rights to create their own courses
- Courses can have one or more teachers

libwayne is a library of reasonably abstract datatypes and algorithms written in C.

The algorithms in libwayne are by no means original. Many of them are taken verbatim from textbooks on data structures and algorithms, and I simply translated them into C. They include efficient and correct routines for priority queues, event-driven simulations, queues, stacks, binary trees, sets of integers, graphs (the node-edge kind), some combinatorics routines, ODE integration routines, a simple statistics package, and a matrix-vector library.

Many of the routines (heap, stack, queue, bintree) can work with arbitrary objects, not just integers. Comparisons are done with pointers to comparison functions, similar to ANSI Cs standard qsort. This library is not meant to be complete; I write the routines as I need them, but only high-quality code goes into libwayne.

One thing that many people ask me is ``why didnt you use C++? Without going into a long tirade, suffice it to say that, although I am not a C++ expert (actually, the only stuff I havent learned in intimate detail is templates), I know enough C++ to realize that it is not the be-all, end-all of programming languages. In fact, after several years of C++ being around, it is already beginning a slow fading into history, with Java being its successor --- and not a very good one, at that.

At the risk of sounding like the 40-50 year olds out there who still insist that FORTRAN is a good enough language for everything, Ill be a 30-something who insists that, until something better comes along, C is still a good all-purpose language in which to write heavy, data-structure intensive programs. I believe it was Dennis Ritchie who said something like, "C is rarely the best language for a given task, but its often the second-best," the implication being that its better to learn one language that is second-best for everything, than to learn a new language for every programming task. (One could say the same of English.)

I started libwayne when I realized that I was constantly re-writing little bits of code that did important things that should be in the C standard, but are not. For example, how many times have you written code like this:
if((p = malloc(n)) == NULL) /* or some other fatal error condition */
{
fprintf(stderr, "error: %sn", err_msg);
exit(1);
}

I got sick of it. Furthermore, I often wanted to know more about why my program failed. So I wrote Fatal. Heres its prototype:
void Fatal(char *fmt, ...); /* generates an assertion failure */

It uses varargs so you can pass it an arbitrary list of output arguments just like printf, but it generates an assertion failure so that if you run it under a debugger, you can look at the program nicely as it dies. It turned out to be only the first function I wrote for libwayne, and it was put into a file called "misc.c" which I started including in most of the code I wrote. Another early member of the library was Malloc, which calls Fatal if the standard malloc fails.

Eventually "misc.c" started getting pretty big, with macros for MIN, MAX, ABS, SQR, etc, so I created misc.h and compiled misc.c into an object module. That was about 1993.

About that time I started to realize that, at least in C, we need a way to pass "objects" around in a reasonably transparent way, but sometimes we want to treat pointers as integers. This makes some peoples teeth sweat (my own included), so I invented the voint datatype, which is (you guessed it) a union of (void*) and (int).

Then I started adding more complex algorithms to libwayne, whenever I needed them. Each and every piece of libwayne was written because I needed it, but only things that I took careful time to do well went into libwayne. Any algorithm that needs to compare objects needs a comparison function like the one used by the ANSI standard qsort routine.

jscl-meditor is a java symbolic computing library and mathematical editor.
Main features:
- polynomial system solving
- vectors and matrices
- factorization
- derivatives
- integrals (rational functions)
- boolean algebra
- simplification
- MathML output
- Java code generation
- geometric algebra
Regarding readability, the goal is to produce a code as nice and short as the pseudo-code found in textbooks or research papers. As an illustration, here is what the Euclidean algorithm would look like:
Polynomial gcd(Polynomial p, Polynomial q) {
while(q.signum()!=0) {
Polynomial r=p.remainder(q);
p=q;
q=r;
}
return p;
}
It entails a dedicated development effort. This choice of clear coding, enabled by java, may have consequences in terms of performance compared to other software. But it could be worth the commitment, in the respect that understanding an algorithm just by looking at the code is made possible. For instance, object-orientation allows to hide ugly optimizations behind a clean, easy to use interface.
Some may doubt however that java will ever be as clear as C++ because it doesnt provide operator overloading, which means that a+b is written a.add(b), and will remain as such. The interested reader can look at the ongoing discussion on the matter at Sun.
As for portability, it means that a lot of platforms are available at no cost, from powerful unix workstations or servers to handheld devices. To make it possible, the project is split in two parts : the engine (jscl) and the mathematical editor front-end (meditor). The engine is usable interactively or in batch mode from a java shell interpreter (like BeanShell for instance), or as a java library in any third-party application.
The front-end has currently two implementations (see below). Among others, it is intended for taking course notes. With it, a student can perform the calculations asked by their teacher fast and reliably. The plain text format should make the exchange of notes easy. The produced worksheets can be published on-line thanks to the MathML output feature, for instance on meditorworld (MathML capable browser needed, tested to work with Mozilla).

GOBLIN is a C++ class library focussed on graph optimization and network programming problems. GOBLIN Graph Library deals with all of the standard graph optimization problems discussed by textbooks and in courses on combinatorial optimization.
This software package also consists of a shell interpreter which extends the well-known Tcl/Tk language to graph objects and a graph browser and editor tool. Executable solvers are available for practical optimization problems. The graph browser applies for teaching and scientific documentation purposes.
GOBLIN is open source software and licenced by the GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL). That is, GOBLIN may be downloaded, compiled and used for scientific, educational and other purposes free of charge. For details, in particular the statements about redistribution and changes of the source code, observe the LGPL document which is attached to the package.
Main features:
- The gosh interpreter extends the Tcl/Tk scripting language to graph objects in a natural way.
- The goblet graph browser and editor tool. Graphical front end to the library.
- An open class hierarchy which strictly separates between abstract classes (all mathematical algorithms are defined as methods of abstract classes), implementations (i.e. by incidence lists, adjacency matrices) and logical views (problem transformations).
- A generic branch and bound module with several applications to graph optimization.
- Logging and tracing functionality which allows to study the various algorithms by examples.
- A runtime configuration module controls the selection of mathemetical methods, logging information, and the tracing of data objects.
- Compile time configuration module for code optimization.
- A file interface which can be easily extended to new problem classes.
- Source code for executable solver programs.
Today, GOBLIN provides strongly polynomial algorithms for the following graph optimization problems:
- Shortest paths in graphs and digraphs with negative lengths.
- Negative cycles and minimum mean cycles.
- Strong and 2-connected components.
- Minimum spanning trees, arborescences and 1-trees.
- Maximum st-flows, feasible circulations and b-flows.
- Min-cost st-flows, b-flows and circulations.
- Assignment problems of any kind.
- 1-matchings, b-matchings, capacitated b-matchings, f-factors and degree-constrained subgraphs.
- Directed and undirected Chinese postman problems, T-joins.
Enhancements:
- This release comes with explicit code for orthogonal drawing of trees.
- There are also new generator methods for regular planara graphs.
- A lot of doxygen comments has been added, but dexcription are still far from complete.