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.
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.