[KMnO4]

I’ve always wanted a curated list of textbooks from people who actually read them in depth.

I’ve read through a couple textbooks front-to-back on topics that are completely unrelated to my field[0]. A good textbook should be able to explain tough concepts while engaging the reader with interesting content and relation to the world.

0: I quite enjoyed Anthony J.F. Griffiths et al’s Introduction to Genetic Analysis, despite never taking a genetics or even biology class.

[jjice]

Absolutely agree. I always saw textbooks as a thing I had to read or a place to find the homework problems, not a place to learn.

Then I had a professor who had an accent I struggled to understand. Thankfully, she picked a fantastic Linear Algebra textbook. That's when I realized that the textbook is debatably the most important part of a class (at least for math and science).

[treeman79]

Old math teacher would put homewoek assignment on board at start of day.

So I would just solve it during class. Teaching myself from the book.

One day assignment wasn’t on board. So I asked her for it so I could do it during class.

She was confused and asked me how I was going to learn the material if I wasn’t paying attention.

Well it turns out people get really upset when you logically explain how you don’t need them since the book teaches it just fine.

[nimeni]

Peter Smith's guide to logic textbooks is the gold standard here.

https://www.logicmatters.net/tyl/

[abecedarius]

Something like that: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...

[Rerarom]

That collection of posts/comments is highly misleading.

Better just to search for the subject on reddit.

[abecedarius]

Picking one entry at random: ordinary differential equations. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t...

The corresponding reddit search: https://old.reddit.com/search?q=ordinary+differential+equati...

Draw your own conclusions. From any source, that's what you'll have to do in the end. In this sample, it happens I've skimmed the lesswrong thread's recommended book and thought it looked much more interesting than the text I learned from years before (Boyce & diPrima). The reddit thread seems pretty barren in glancing through the results summary.

[bmitc]

Any particular subjects you are interested in?