Archive for the ‘reference’ Category

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A university math tutorial

Monday, December 6th, 2010

If you have a high-school or college student in the family, you may find this math tutorial page useful. It includes cheat sheets on algebra, trigonometry, and calculus as well as detailed class notes for several courses. It’s very well done.

Welcome to my online math tutorials and notes. The intent of this site is to provide a complete set of free online (and downloadable) notes and/or tutorials for classes that I teach at Lamar University. I’ve tried to write the notes/tutorials in such a way that they should be accessible to anyone wanting to learn the subject regardless of whether you are in my classes or not. In other words, they do not assume you’ve got any prior other than the standard set of prerequiste material needed for that class. In other words, it is assumed that you know Algebra and Trig prior to reading the Calculus I notes, know Calculus I prior to reading the Calculus II notes, etc. The assumptions about your background that I’ve made are given with each description below.

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Get a free Chicago Manual of Style – from 1906

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

As part of the launch of the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, the University of Chicago Press is offering a free e-book of the first edition of the CMS, originally published in 1906. You have until the end of the month to grab your copy.

For those of you inclined to spend the waning days of summer pondering such questions as these — comparing and contrasting the old and the new, the “firmer” versus the flaccid — the University of Chicago Press is offering a free e-book version of the first edition of the Manual of Style (“published back in like 1906,” the press’s Mark Heineke wrote in an e-mail) throughout the month of September. As the press says on its Web site: now that the 16th edition is out, “it seems appropriate to bend an arc back to the very first edition and give it a new, virtual life in electronic form.” To receive a copy, you have to go to this link and enter your e-mail address.

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The Ultimate Photoshop Toolbox

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Noupe continues to produce excellent posts summarizing resources in key areas. The Ultimate Photoshop Toolbox is a long post containing an annotated list (with screens shots too) of Photoshop resources on the Internet. It contains web sites about Photoshop, downloadable brushes and PSD files, PDFs about Photoshop, and a host of other useful resources. This is definitely one for the bookmark file.

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Adobe Illustrator tutorials

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

I don’t have much occasion to use a vector drawing program. Earlier in my career, I used CorelDRAW! for charts and diagrams, but switched over to Visio and have been using that ever since. But if I had to, I’d probably be using Adobe Illustrator, and I’d be looking at some of the tutorials on this page for help.

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Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition is out

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

The 16th edition of the venerable Chicago Manual of Style has been published simultaneously in print and online versions.  The new edition includes expanded coverage of electronic publishing, an electronic editing checklist, a new section on parallel structure, and many other changes. See the What’s New page for a complete list.

I’ve stopped buying the print edition and now subscribe to the electronic edition. It’s searchable and much more convenient to use than the book. The 16th edition looks like it’s a major update and worth looking at if you’re still using an earlier version.

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Graphic Design Theory: 50 Resources and Articles

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Here’s a page listing 50 resources and articles about graphic design theory. If you’re like me, and primarily word-oriented instead of graphics-oriented, you’ll want all the help you can get, and this is a good place to start. The list is annotated with brief descriptions of each resource.

As designers, we often focus on the practical aspects of design above all else. We focus on what works, with little regard for why it works. And in our day-to-day work, that outlook serves us well. It lets us get our work done in an efficient, professional manner, and generally nets good results.

But spending some time on the theory behind the graphic design principles we use every day can expand our design horizons. It can open up new avenues of creativity and experimentation that can lead our designs from just good, to fantastic. On that note, below are 50 excellent resources and articles that discuss graphic design theory, including layout, color theory, and typography. Feel free to share additional resources and articles in the comments.

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