Wondering about which version to get of the First Edition (2012) of the book A Hands-On Introduction to Using Python in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, by Johnny Wei-Bing Lin? Here are some thoughts to help you decide.
Who would not want to pay money for this book?
- The convenience of a paper copy isn't that important to you.
- The convenience of functional hyperlinks (both to external resources as well as navigating within the book) in a PDF copy isn't that important to you.
- You have limited funds.
- You're not sure if you really want the book and just want to try it out.
- You are interested in such a small portion of the book that it makes no sense to buy the whole thing.
If this is you, the book's web site has available, for free, PDFs of every chapter as separate files.
Who would want to pay money for this book?
- The convenience of a paper copy is important to you.
- The convenience of functional hyperlinks (both to external resources as well as navigating within the book) in a PDF copy is important to you.
- You want to help financially support the author.
If this is you, you can buy a black-and-white paper copy of the book here and a hyperlink-enabled color PDF copy of the book here.
A special appeal to instructors
Instruction at for-profit institutions, as a commercial use, is not covered under the terms of the license of the book (the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, a.k.a. CC BY-NC-SA; see below) and so instructors at those institutions should not make copies of the book for students beyond copying permitted under Fair Use. Instruction at not-for-profit institutions is not a commercial use, so instructors may legally make copies of this book for the students in their classes, under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA, so long as no profit is made through the copy and sale (or Fair Use is not exceeded). However, most instruction at not-for-profit institutions still involves payment of tuition: lots of people are getting paid for their contributions. Please consider also paying the author of this book something for his contribution.
Regardless of whether or not you paid money for your copy of the book, you are free to use any and all parts of the book under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
