[nostrademons]

He said "before the first day", not "on the first day". Oftentimes the textbooks are announced and available for purchase about 2 weeks before the class actually begins, to give the students that order them online time to receive them.

It's not actually that hard. If you have 14 days and your textbook is 700 pages long, that's 50 pages a day, which is eminently possible, particularly if you don't have classes to go to.

Occasionally, I pulled a trick where I went to the first class, grabbed the syllabus, bought the textbook, read the textbook cover-to-cover during the "shopping period" where we could change our classes, dropped the class, and then returned the textbook for a full refund. All the material, 1/6th the time, and none of the money.

Actually, now that I'm employed and have an income, I do basically the same thing: buy the textbook online, read it, and don't bother taking the course. 1/6th the time, 1/50th the money (~$100 instead of ~$5000), and I learn just as much.

[shadowpwner]

Why bother signing up for the class in the beginning? A quick Google search would result in good textbook recommendations.

[nostrademons]

This was 2003, when many fewer universities put their syllabi up on the public web (MIT OCW had been announced just a few months before, and most places still used private Blackboard pages if they used anything at all). It was still possible to get textbook recommendations if you knew where to look - I got many of them off the C2 Wiki a year or so later - but it was not immediately obvious that one could simply Google and the answers would magically appear.

[cperciva]

Despite having a firm grasp on course material before it was presented in class, I found most of my lectures very useful, because they provided me with a different perspective on things.

[shadowpwner]

He (original poster) dropped the class before attending any of the lectures.