User:Coldauron/Preface Draft

Some questions you want to answer in defining the book:
 * What type of book will it be? Reference, textbook, self-study course, tutorial, experimentation instructions, travel report, etc.
 * Who is the target audience? How old are its constituents?  What is their background?  How advanced are their reading skills?  Are they children or adults, students, hobbyists, or professionals, researchers or scientists?  An advanced level for a hobbyist is quite different from that of a researcher.
 * What is the scope of the book? How much you want to cover -- in terms of topic, history and/or audience level -- helps determine where you start, and where you end.  This also determines what to leave in and what to leave out.

This Wikibook is intended to be a concise introduction to important concepts in Calculus (alongside a few tidbits of additional mathematics), Special Relativity, and Quantum Physics, and to show how these fields are related to one another. This book is not intended to be a comprehensive work on any of the three subjects, but is intended to be a good starting point for the study of higher mathematics and modern physics. This book will give the reader a good idea of where to go next and give them a solid base when moving on to higher level texts.

Definition of this Wikibook

 * What type of book will it be? This book will be a textbook which would be suitable for a sort of survey course, investigating the basics of many important topics in advanced mathematics and modern physics. The focus will be placed on a conceptual understanding of these ideas, as well as the provision of links where the reader can find more detailed information.
 * Who is the target audience? This book is targeted at anyone with a knowledge of pre-calculus and basic physics, who wishes to gain a basic understanding of these more advanced subjects.
 * What is the scope of the book? This book will cover the concepts typically included in introductory, undergraduate-level courses in special relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as the mathematical background necessary to define said concepts.

Local Manual of Style
The following are a few key stylistic guidelines that this book should adhere to:
 * Flat structure - The deepest level of page organization for this book is one level below the main page, referred to as the Chapter level. For robust organization, chapters should be referred to by name using links. The organizational structure seen in the table of contents on the main page may be subject to change, so references to Parts or Sub-parts should be avoided, and Part, Sub-part, Chapter, or Section numbers should not be used.
 * Naming convention - Chapter names should capitalize only their first letter.
 * Wikilinking - Intra-book piped links should be used for chapter references. Cross-project links should be used to provide readers with a jumping-off point to find additional information on a topic which is beyond the scope of the book. External links should be avoided.
 * Standard navigation - No navigation scheme is implemented, beyond the default link back to the main page. The necessity of an index remains to be determined.
 * Images on the right - To avoid conflicts with alignment of mathematical formulae, images should be wrapped on the right as captioned thumbnails.
 * Mathematical formulae on the left - Formulae should be on their own lines, left aligned, and indented once.
 * Single category - All chapters should be categorized together using BookCat.

The necessity of an introduction, glossaries, appendices, bibliography, print and PDF versions, and a collection remains to be determined.