The Open Logic Text

As you will very probably have already seen, The Open Logic Project (a team of serious and good people) has now made available an early public version open-source collaborative logic text, somewhat ploddingly called the Open Logic Text. 

There are two things to comment on here (eventually!), namely the Text itself — or at any rate, the current snapshot of an evolving text — and the open-source nature of the enterprise.

At a first quick glance, the Text does look rather uneven: there are 77 pages on first-order logic and beyond (some at quite an elementary level), 100 pages on computability, incompleteness, etc. (this looks like a solid graduate course), and then just 21 pages on sets (at a very much lower level of sophistication). Still, this is obviously exactly the sort of thing that should be covered in the Teach Yourself Logic Study Guide. So when I’ve had a chance to take a serious look, I’ll report back with my two pennies’ worth, maybe in a mid-year update to the Guide.

As the Project site says of the Text,

… you can download the LaTeX code. It is open: you’re free to change it whichever way you like, and share your changes. It is collaborative: a team of people is working on it, using the GitHub platform, and we welcome contributions and feedback.

I will be really interested to see how this pans out in practice. Using GitHub is a notch or three above my current nerdiness grade. But I simply don’t know if this is me just not keeping up with everyone — or whether it is pretty typical for logicians to know a smidgeon of very basic LaTeX, with that being about their geek limit. Maybe, at least as a bit of exercise to keep the brain from entirely rusting up, I should take a look at this GitHub malarky about which I’ve heard tell before (any useful pointers to an idiot’s guide?). Then I could also report back about how the collaborative aspect looks to a complete beginner. Again, watch this space.