[WalterBright]

At Caltech, a textbook was often specified by the Prof, but was rarely referenced or used.

> All course content was written up in the lecture notes provided on the course homepage, variously a neatly-formatted LaTeX document or a scan of the instructor's literal handwritten notes.

I discovered (and others have confirmed) that handouts of lecture notes are not very effective. What is effective is the prof writes them on the chalkboard and the student copies them, by hand, into a notebook.

Labor saving machinery doesn't work when trying to learn a subject.

[yorwba]

Taking notes during a lecture is a neat trick to force the content to stay in short-term memory for at least a little while. But that also comes with the risk of transmission errors. Instructor-provided lecture notes can serve as a canonical reference. As long as you don't treat them as a labor-saving device, but instead as an error-correcting mechanism, they're helpful.