At the school I went to, many of the classes had no formal textbooks. You bought a 50-100 page of not terribly dense text/examples; these were photocopies on p

At the school I went to, many of the classes had no formal textbooks. You bought a 50-100 page of not terribly dense text/examples; these were photocopies on plain old letter paper that were stapled together and pre-punched for three-ring-binders. Each class you'd buy one of those per semester and they were developed in-house. That was it. Naturally, it wasn't always this way, but certainly for the basic classes it was exactly this way. Note this wasn't any sort of engineering field and what they were teaching didn't have a lot of authors writing standard issue coursework to begin with, but it was great material that was very focused to the classes they were teaching. I still hold on to them, too: very concise and a nice reference if I ever need to brush up.