And then there is TYL and a Gentle Introduction …
The Teach Yourself Logic Study Guide usually gets the most downloads here — recently, a fairly consistent seventeen hundred or more downloads a month (with occasional upward spikes). The Guide has grown by accretion over the years to the current 93 pages, and to be honest it is by now a bit of an inconsistent mess, in terms of levels of detail and coverage. So given how much it is used and recommended, and given the absence of any obvious alternative, I suppose I really ought to settle down to re-thinking it and re-writing it. Which could be fun in its way but is slightly daunting.
And then, to my considerable surprise and embarrassment, Category Theory: A Gentle Introduction gets an equally consistent six hundred or so downloads a month. Surprise, because there are so many available good sets of lecture notes and freely available books out there (as listed here). Embarrassment, because it is a very rough-and-ready unfinished draft — though it already weighs in at 291 pages; it needs a lot of corrections and a lot of development and expansion to get it into a decent state. And that’s an even more daunting prospect given my pretty amateur and tenuous grasp of category theory! But people have said nice things about the Gentle Introduction even as it stands: and I think it is just different enough from the alternatives in level (more accessible!) and organization (more logical!) to be worth having a good bash at improving it.
I’m really not sure, though, how to juggle thinking about a possible IFL3, re-writing TYL, and diving into a lot of category theory homework. But I suppose it is good not to run out of projects that may be a bit daunting but still seem realistically manageable (at least these are finitely limited projects in a way that more purely philosophical projects tend not to be). I’ll just have to see how the spirit moves me once I’ve really got GWT done and dusted …
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