Introduction

This project is demonstration of our ideas on what an electronic textbook should be like.

Contemporary web technologies unavoidably will lead to prevalent use of electronic textbooks as compared with their paper counterparts. This prevalence is accounted for not only by a more convenient navigation but also by quicker information search, but, in the first place, by interactivity – interaction between the student and the textbook. Interaction means not only one-direction activity

Textbook –> Student
But the reciprocal activity
Student –> Textbook

In other words, student can ask questions and get the answers even if such answers cannot be found in the textbook. To a certain extent interactive textbook is intended to substitute a teacher/advisor, which is, to our mind, indispensable requirement for the use of such teaching materials within the system of distance learning.

If you would like to learn how to retrieve information from a database, but don’t know what to begin with, then this book is intended for you. If you are familiar with SQL, or even are a database specialist, it still may be of interest for you to test your level of knowledge.

P.S. This introduction was written more than 20 years ago, when artificial intelligence was not yet used, but, as we believe, it has not yet lost its relevance.