November 18th, 2006
As it turns out, the availability of books is not going be a problem at all. After week one of Software Architecture, the assigned reading accumulates to 154 pages. That covers three lectures out of a total of nine, all to be completed in the space of four weeks. I'm not a terribly slow reader, but these kinds of volumes humble me. If one were to adopt a naive linear regression for the complete number of pages to peruse in this period, it would make it 3*154 + the rest of the chapters in the textbook not assigned to any lecture + the inclusion of a master thesis of 118 pages in one of the lectures. It seems ridiculous now that I would actually think about acquiring more reading material to complement this stack.
It makes me wonder what is it like to study something that is both voluminous and consists entirely of reading material. Are the guys in psychology in submarines submerged in an apartment full of books?
My Cold War Studies course was like that. Just heaps of informative lectures accompanied by two books with the basic outlines but in order to pass the course by writing decent essays, there was no way you could get out of reading official government reports, heaps of books, tonnes of essays, billions of newspaper articles... Oyy...