Sorry for a long citation (this is from "Practical Mechanics for Boys"), couldn't help myself:
"The American method of teaching the mechanical arts has some disadvantages, as compared with the apprentice system followed in England, and very largely on the continent.
It is too often the case that here a boy or a young man begins work in a machine shop, not for the avowed purpose of learning the trade, but simply as a helper, with no other object in view than to get his weekly wages.
Abroad, the plan is one which, for various reasons, could not be tolerated here. There he is bound for a certain term of years, and with the prime object of teaching him to become an artisan. More often than otherwise he pays for this privilege, and he knows it is incumbent on him "to make good" right from the start.
He labors under the disadvantage, however, that he has a certain tenure, and in that course he is not pushed forward from one step to the next on account of any merit of his own. His advancement is fixed by the time he has put in at eachp. 2 part of the work, and thus no note is taken of his individuality.
Here the boy rises step after step by virtue of his own qualifications, and we recognize that one boy has the capacity to learn faster than another. If he can learn in one year what it requires three in another to acquire, in order to do it as perfectly, it is an injury to the apt workman to be held back and deterred from making his way upwardly.
It may be urged that the apprentice system instills thoroughness. This may be true; but it also does another thing: It makes the man a mere machine. The true workman is a thinker. He is ever on the alert to find easier, quicker and more efficient means for doing certain work."
I'm not sure if the message has become garbled, but I can't seem to get the conclusion there. That the American system instills more innovative thinking at the expense of thoroughness?
The original English/European Guild/Apprentice system roughly went Apprentice -> Journeyman -> Master.
An Apprentice would learn from a Master and become competent in basic techniques, no innovation was expected at that stage. A Journeyman would travel around and work for different Masters, learning more and different techniques and transferring them between Masters. Finally a Journeyman would produce a "Masterpiece" to become a Master and setup shop somewhere. Innovation was really only expected by Journeymen and Masters.
The idea of "making good" right from the start is the thoroughness part. Whatever task the apprentice is set, they think of it as part of their career path and do it absolutely to the best of their ability. That's the idea, anyway. It's like the situation with sushi chefs: they spend years doing little more than washing rice, but it supposedly instills an attitude that even the most trivial task is beautiful and worthy of care -- because they have had time to realise that while focusing on it.
That's just my interpretation. The experience I've had in various semi-vocational educational contexts in the UK is that part of the message is that preparatory/ancillary tasks are just as important as the skillful work. Focusing on them is arguably the only way to acquire the attitude needed to do the skilled work.
Love it! I thought this would be another collection of books about programming languages and data structures and stuff. I was very pleasantly surprised!
The differences between archive.org and gutenberg.org are vast IMHO. The former may have more titles, but they're just OCR'd scans, and some of them nearly illegible. On the flip side, gutenberg.org is a curated list, sometimes heavily so.
For instance, the following quotes are from the intro/header for Macbeth, by W. Shakespeare [1]:
"Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions, all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a copyright notice is included."
But also incredible attention to details when proof reading:
"As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words or letters they had often packed into a "cliche"... this is the original meaning of the term cliche... and thus, being unwilling to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions that look very odd... such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, above... and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner....
The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at a time when they were out of "v"'s. . .possibly having used "vv" in place of some "w"'s, etc. This was a common practice of the day, as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spend more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as I have mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have an extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a very high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare. My father read an assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the
purpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available... in great detail... and determined from the various changes, that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous for signing his name with several different spellings.
So, please take this into account when reading the comments below made by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errors that are "not" errors....
So...with this caveat...we have NOT changed the canon errors, here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare's The Tragedie of Macbeth."
Not on the same level - but may I highlight the Fun Press Bookshelf [1] (for Free Functional Programmings Book) in TXT and the Yuki & Moto Bookshelf [2] (for Free Ruby & Friends Programming Books) in TXT (using the Manuscripts format) [3].
[1]: http://funpress.github.io
[2]: http://yukimotopress.github.io
[3]: http://manuscripts.github.io
Are project Gutenberg books still relevant? I am not someone who knows a lot about technology. Therefore, I am not sure how to gauge the relevance of these 50 to 100-year old texts.
"The American method of teaching the mechanical arts has some disadvantages, as compared with the apprentice system followed in England, and very largely on the continent.
It is too often the case that here a boy or a young man begins work in a machine shop, not for the avowed purpose of learning the trade, but simply as a helper, with no other object in view than to get his weekly wages.
Abroad, the plan is one which, for various reasons, could not be tolerated here. There he is bound for a certain term of years, and with the prime object of teaching him to become an artisan. More often than otherwise he pays for this privilege, and he knows it is incumbent on him "to make good" right from the start.
He labors under the disadvantage, however, that he has a certain tenure, and in that course he is not pushed forward from one step to the next on account of any merit of his own. His advancement is fixed by the time he has put in at eachp. 2 part of the work, and thus no note is taken of his individuality.
Here the boy rises step after step by virtue of his own qualifications, and we recognize that one boy has the capacity to learn faster than another. If he can learn in one year what it requires three in another to acquire, in order to do it as perfectly, it is an injury to the apt workman to be held back and deterred from making his way upwardly.
It may be urged that the apprentice system instills thoroughness. This may be true; but it also does another thing: It makes the man a mere machine. The true workman is a thinker. He is ever on the alert to find easier, quicker and more efficient means for doing certain work."
The original English/European Guild/Apprentice system roughly went Apprentice -> Journeyman -> Master. An Apprentice would learn from a Master and become competent in basic techniques, no innovation was expected at that stage. A Journeyman would travel around and work for different Masters, learning more and different techniques and transferring them between Masters. Finally a Journeyman would produce a "Masterpiece" to become a Master and setup shop somewhere. Innovation was really only expected by Journeymen and Masters.
That's just my interpretation. The experience I've had in various semi-vocational educational contexts in the UK is that part of the message is that preparatory/ancillary tasks are just as important as the skillful work. Focusing on them is arguably the only way to acquire the attitude needed to do the skilled work.
My favorites:
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7
https://archive.org/details/CProgrammingLanguage2ndEditionBy...
https://archive.org/details/cprogramminglang00kern
https://archive.org/search.php?query=mechanical%20engineerin...
The Gutenberg collection is quite small.
For instance, the following quotes are from the intro/header for Macbeth, by W. Shakespeare [1]:
"Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions, all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a copyright notice is included."
But also incredible attention to details when proof reading:
"As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words or letters they had often packed into a "cliche"... this is the original meaning of the term cliche... and thus, being unwilling to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions that look very odd... such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, above... and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner....
The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at a time when they were out of "v"'s. . .possibly having used "vv" in place of some "w"'s, etc. This was a common practice of the day, as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spend more on a wider selection of characters than they had to.
You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as I have mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have an extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a very high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare. My father read an assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the purpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available... in great detail... and determined from the various changes, that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous for signing his name with several different spellings.
So, please take this into account when reading the comments below made by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errors that are "not" errors....
So...with this caveat...we have NOT changed the canon errors, here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare's The Tragedie of Macbeth."
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2264