1  How to use this book

Warning

As stated elsewhere in the material, this book is still very much a work in progress. Nevertheless, here are (evolving) instructions for how to make the best use of it.

The material presented here is presented as both a website and a stand-alone book (in both PDF and EPUB formats). It can be daunting to know how it is all organized, so here are some tips for navigating the content. In particular, the type of information you may be seeking probably falls under one of these categories:

If the information you are looking for does not fall into any of those categories, please feel free to e-mail me. Otherwise, below is a more detailed description of each of those categories and where to find the corresponding content in this book.

1.1 Overview of technical content

Though the table of contents (shown on the left-hand side for the website, or in the initial pages for the PDF) is a good guide for the technical content contained herein, Chapter 3 contains a view of the schedule by which the content will be covered during class and may be a more useful guiding source. In particular, Chapter 3 has direct links to the lecture slides, the reference material and assignments for each lecture.

1.2 Lecture slides and notes

For each lecture, accompanying lecture notes are provided in the book. Additionally, during some lectures I also utilize slides and when I do, these are made available via this book as an external reference. To know which chapter of the book refers to a particular lecture, you will want to look at Chapter 3 (i.e., the schedule).

Lecture notes are currently very thin, as they are only meant to provide an orientation for how the lecture will proceed. However, they contain links to the slides (when appropriate), citations for the reading material from which the lecture was sourced, as well as a collection of questions that were left unanswered during the lecture.

1.3 Supplemental reading material

As stated in the previous section, supplemental reading material is typically provided as a reference for each of the lectures. To find this material you can either request a copy of the book or reference through the library or, more conveniently, navigate to the Files -> Readings section in Canvas to find a copy of the book chapters that were referenced.

1.4 Logistical and administrative information about the course

The full course syllabus is available on Canvas under Syllabus, or under File -> syllabus -> syllabus.pdf. An abridged version is also available in this book in Chapter 2.

1.5 Assignments and solutions

A list of assignments, along with their due date is available in Appendix B. It is also available in the course syllabus as found in Canvas.

1.6 Example problems

As we work on problems in class, I will make an effort to post those problems directly on the lecture notes for the corresponding lecture.