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The Best Textbooks on Every Subject

823 points by Ibethewalrus 8y ago

maerF0x0 8y ago
> On business, joshkaufman recommends Kaufman's The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business over Bevelin's Seeking Wisdom and Munger's Poor Charlie's Alamanack. What a rat. Recommends his own book over two others. This is exactly what is wrong with University textbook selection. They're often just picking their friends, or someone who picked their textbook. Crooked and corrupt.
- swanson 8y ago
  Seeking Wisdom is also really, really good. Super approachable and underrated. The Personal MBA is also great, but I do agree that it's poor form for Josh to recommend his own book.
- blairbeckwith 8y ago
  Probably could have used a more clear disclosure, but it is probably one of the best books for a solid overview.
  - jimrandomh 8y ago
    If you look at the comment where he makes that recommendation, it starts with: > "I'm the author, so feel free to discount appropriately." The process of consolidating all the recommendations into a list didn't leave room to say that sort of thing, though.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Add a star next to the item and a foot note or exclude your book from the list.
- PacifyFish 8y ago
  Have you read the book?
  - maerF0x0 8y ago
    I have not. It very well could be true (which I do realize would be contrary to corruption). But I do not trust the jury of 1 composed of the author.
    - jrumbut 8y ago
      Having the best product and corrupt practices aren't mutually exclusive at all. I mean this in general, this example here where an author is promoting his own book without hiding his name is borderline. Says more about the site's reliability than the author's honesty to me.
- Ibethewalrus 8y ago
  Agree 100%. I submitted this post but arrived at the same conclusion with this book recommendation, also the author is way too young to have ample experience...
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Too young to have ample experience? He’s distilling the results of reading over a thousand books on various business topics into a book on what business is. You don’t need ample experience for that. You need the stamina to read, judge and summarise all those books and the good taste and writing ability to actually write it. It’s like the process of a journalist writing a book on a topic they have only the vaguest idea about, there’s a lot of reading and at some stage hopefully some understanding slips in. Except Josh has a business degree and worked at Procter & Gamble so he actually knew what he was on about before he started writing.
- yontherubicon 8y ago
  I can't say I blame him. I mean, if I thought someone had written a better book on a subject than I could, I doubt I'd bother writing the book!
  - 394549 8y ago
    I kinda feel the most ethical thing for an author to do is focus on a recommendation for the best book that isn't theirs (e.g. besides my book X, I'd recommend Y for Z reasons).
    - komali2 8y ago
      Why would they have bothered writing the book if others existed? Or, if better books existed after they wrote theirs, why would they bother mentioning theirs at all?
      - macintux 8y ago
        You can acknowledge that someone else's book is well-written, accurate, and valuable even if you think yours is better, or has a different focus, or a different pedagogical method, or...
    - inetsee 8y ago
      The rules for the list don't say that an author can't recommend his/her own book. The rules do say that a recommender must explain why he/she recommends one book over others, which this author did.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    You shouldn't trust a book recommendation of the recommender doesn't explain why they are recommending it. If you write your own textbook, you had better be prepared to explain why your book is better than other books on the same subject.
    - Jtsummers 8y ago
      The author did, though you may not find it satisfactory. In particular, people attacked him for recommending his book, with little specific counterargument ("it's terrible" isn't good enough). If they had engaged him in a dialog instead of insulting, maybe we'd have a better justification in the list.
- ProAm 8y ago
  > Crooked and corrupt. It's just business. Every business does it. Get used to it. Have an iPhone are forced to buy things from the App Store? Crooked and corrupt...? Bought a Tesla and cant use it for independent ride sharing? Crooked and corrupt? It's just business.
  - 394549 8y ago
    >> Crooked and corrupt. > It's just business. Every business does it. Get used to it. No, that's how you get endemic corruption, which eventually leads to things like people dying from deliberately tainted food and shoddy medicine. Widespread intolerance of corruption and scams eventually builds a trustworthy environment that's better for everyone.
    - ProAm 8y ago
      It's just business. Recommending your own text book is not crooked and corrupt. It's business. Forcing your users to acquire all apps for your iPhone through your own app store is also not crooked and corrupt. It's just business. Everyone tolerates it because money talks.
      - 394549 8y ago
        > It's just business. Everyone tolerates it because money talks. Sometimes "business" must bow down to things like ethics, otherwise it tends towards corruption and exploitation. Hocking your own book in a list of the "best textbooks on every subject" is definitely a kind of corruption. It may get you some sales but it abuses the list and any trust placed in it. Recommendations like that should be made without such conflicts of interest. Also, repeating "it's just business" a bunch of times isn't a very good argument in favor of anything, it's nearly totally free of any content.
        ProAm 8y ago
        > Sometimes "business" must bow down to things like ethics, otherwise it tends towards corruption and exploitation. That's if you get caught. On paper I completely agree with you, but in reality I think you'll find many many many businesses and industry that skirt ethically and moral behavior to cement their bottom line. I keep repeating its just business because it is, ultimately everything comes down to money especially in business. Is it inappropriate to charge people a higher price for an airline ticket because they browse your website with a macbook? It happens. What about amazon raising the price for an item because you've browsed it several times in the past already? Recommending your own book because you believe in its contents but also helps to put a roof over your head? It's all just business.
- bsder 8y ago
  > What a rat. Recommends his own book over two others. This is exactly what is wrong with University textbook selection. They're often just picking their friends, or someone who picked their textbook. Crooked and corrupt. My professor for Political Science recommended his own book. He also donated all of the money he would have made on it for our class into the general fund for the students. Which meant that he lost money because not everybody in the class bought the book. Textbooks are a racket. Especially the "rental" model which effectively admits that the textbook has zero utility beyond the class. However, the professors are neither the cause nor gaining the profits from that racket. The act of writing a textbook takes so much time and effort, that it really isn't profitable for the vast majority of professors.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  Well, to give credit where it's due, The Personal MBA is not a bad book. It has a slightly misleading title though. It should have been called "extremely short pieces about various aspects of business". The real value of it, at least for me, is inspiration. I read a small chapter (which is often just a page or half) and think how it relates to my actual situation. This gives me some food for thought, and very often for action, for a couple of days. Then I go back to the book, read the next piece, and so on. I sometimes disagree with the author, but it's a positive experience overall.
  - ambicapter 8y ago
    God, I hate books like that. In my youth, I got on a freestyle kick (go watch Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme) and bought a book called 'How To Rap' because it was well reviewed. I was hoping for some sort of insight from the greats. It was entirely made of just quotes from different rappers. Barely any structure whatsoever.
    - jkchu 8y ago
      I am partway through reading The Personal MBA, and the book of quotes you mentions sound very, very different. Sure, The Personal MBA is not a deep dive into any subject (it's not meant to be) but it's got a lot more meat than just quotes from other textbooks.
- blackstache 8y ago
  We likely agree on the larger sentiment here, but in fairness to the author I think the context of the post makes this more acceptable. The textbook recommendations are all submitted in the comments below the compiled list, and the author's own submission[0] includes at least a disclaimer and a justification for why the author felt the need to write the book. 0: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject#cxfYBFGhbbP7TgQ4c https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t... Edit: I have not read this book or any others in the domain, just wanted to add some context I did not already see in this thread.
- jkchu 8y ago
  While I agree that it's not "in good taste" to recommend your own book like this. I feel your reaction is a bit harsh and did not consider that he actually gave disclosure upon recommending the book.
fady 8y ago
The link does not work for me. Anyone else having the same issue?
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  It eventually does, just keep trying.
- dguo 8y ago
  Same here. I tried the home page, but it's not loading either.
- kevinoid 8y ago
  Same here. It's available on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180726150520/https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject https://web.archive.org/web/20180726150520/https://www.lessw... Note that I had to disable JavaScript to prevent it from hiding the content and displaying "Sorry, we couldn't find what you were looking for."
- mark3141 8y ago
  Works for me
- habryka 8y ago
  (Main Dev of site here: Sorry for that! I should really get around to setting up autoscaling. Site should now be properly available again.)
  - ma2rten 8y ago
    Actually you should probably set up a CDN. There is no need to serve pages that are the same for every visitor from your server.
  - Jach 8y ago
    I've been out of the loop a long time -- did the backend change along with the frontend? I remember LW links surviving HN hugs before...
xd2024 8y ago
I don't think the author has read two other lists of best textbooks... dubious methodology
jimrandomh 8y ago
Alternate link with better caching: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-bes...
Daycrawler2 8y ago
Not that I have specific issues with the recommendations there, but from a conceptual standpoint, why should I trust recommendations on every subjects from a centralized non-specialized site when I can search for sites specialized in each subjects and take their recommendations on their own subjects instead.
- maxmcd 8y ago
  To me, this article strongly recommends reading textbooks and softly recommends this list. They even go into detail about what methods should be used to validate textbooks generally!
- hyperpape 8y ago
  I share your doubts. For instance, I have a URL saved on my home computer where the (admittedly non-universal) HN consensus was that the CLRS algorithms book recommended here is not a great one to learn from. However, I think your faith that it's easy to find good recommendations by subject matter experts underestimates the difficulty of finding them in the mass of things on the internet. To take one example, I remember reading a post about two approaches to denotational semantics, along with recommendations about the best textbooks, but have never subsequently been able to find that link.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ipcac 8y ago
  If you input the term "discrete mathematics" in the search field "Books" on Amazon, you get about 15 books (not counting the advertised ones) per page and 101 pages of those. If you slightly change criteria (change the search field by subject or tweak the date or add another term to "discrete mathematics" or ...), you get even more hits (many more). This is essentially a bottomless well. Most books found in this way (many of them incredibly good) will never be found in the lists like that offered by OP for many reasons: lists like that of OP favor 'classics", every month there's a new book on the market that tries to outdo the existing ones, etc Many writers of the newer books are aware of the existence of the classics (in fact, many had to learn from them), so in their books they point out the pitfalls, fill in the holes, add more details and make your learning experience all around more pleasant. The books in the OP's list might not work for everyone, so you have to do your own searching, sorting and analysis. This is especially true if you are a self-learner and much more so if the subject you want to learn is math because in math you are the one who has to prove every one of your assertions and be as independent as possible. tl; dr: don't worry about the "expert opinion". Instead collect data, clean it, analyze it and the consume the parts you need. That way you avoid 'expertise' that comes bundled with traditionalisms, bureaucracy, calcified thinking and other undesirable bullshit.
Jtsummers 8y ago
Anyone here read the "Thinking in Systems" book? systems thinking seems to be surprisingly absent from many professional developers and engineers. Or, they lack the ability to abstract properly beyond their specific domains. I'm trying to improve this in my office and would like to find some books to hand out to people (particularly some of the more promising young folks, influence them before they get stuck in a bad mode of thought). Based on the Amazon reviews it seems like it might be the sort of book I'm looking for, I'll continue to check through those and for other reviews later.
- mpax 8y ago
  complexitylabs.io offers plenty of gentle introductory material.
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    Interesting. I'll check out the courses they have over the weekend. I appreciate the link.
- alexashka 8y ago
  I don't find it anymore surprising than interest in mathematics being absent from many people. The solution to your surprise will be a re-calibration of the expectations you have, not them magically becoming more like you :)
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    A brain dump of my thoughts on this follows: http://www.thinking.net/Systems_Thinking/OverviewSTarticle.pdf http://www.thinking.net/Systems_Thinking/OverviewSTarticle.p... Kind of gets at what I'm wanting to convey to people. Often (especially with technical people) we focus on a narrow thing. I have a problem, I will fix it. We don't examine the environment in which the problem exists to actually understand its causes and impacts. Maybe my problem is actually not a problem for the organization, it may actually be a benefit. Example: A friend works in aircraft maintenance. They do something called "bonded repair", using adhesives to apply patches rather than other techniques. It's remarkably effective. But when the patch is later removed during a big maintenance effort, the technicians have to remove the remaining adhesives. They've been given a plastic (consumable) tool, it's slow and breaks but they're cheap and ultimately effective. The technicians look at the "problem" (too slow, breaks) and go find a metal tool. It's faster, doesn't break, they can get the whole area cleared by lunch. Great! No! The metal tool introduces scratches. Scratches become failure points in the future so they have to be repaired before the aircraft is released. The local optimum introduced a 2-week delay in releasing every aircraft while damage detection and repair was conducted. And potentially worse failures in the future if the scratches aren't detected. A systems thinker would examine the whole of the operation before solving their local problem. This is the thing I want to convey to my colleagues. For developers, the locally (to you or maybe even your team) optimal decision to use language X may seem great. But then it turns out you aren't the one maintaining it in 5 years. Your choice to use Rust in 2011 was ok. But now in 2018 none of your code compiles because of changes to the language in the intervening 7 years [0]. Now the maintainers have to rewrite things, or stick with a now very outdated and potentially unstable compiler and tool suite. C++ may have been unpleasant to use, but it may have been a better choice within the environment of the decision. Other times, by not applying systems thinking, you find yourself solving the same or similar problems over and over. Perhaps your code review process is incomplete, or your use of version control is non-existent or haphazard. Have you ever been in a shop where the same damn bug showed up every second or third build? Why? Because they solved the problem (the bug) but failed to understand the process and systemic problems that permitted the regression in the first place. And if that regression-permission-failure isn't addressed, other regressions will happen in the future and may go undetected. ===== Long story short: Systems engineering applies systems thinking to the design and development of, well, systems. Software engineers should definitely study it, at least if they want to be called engineers. But systems thinking is a component of systems engineering that can go way beyond that one area in terms of applications. The more people can view things this way, the better off your team, your office, your company, your world can be. My problem is not just conveying the value of it (I have anecdotes galore), but actually bringing people up to the level where they can do it themselves, independent of my prodding and guiding. ===== [0] Not a dig on Rust. They've stabilized the language specification, but this is a thing that can and does happen.
asafira 8y ago
I have to admit that I have often disagreed with others over what textbooks are best, but I think that's natural. For one, you often start a field with a specific book. If you pour a lot of time into that book, you often feel more attached to it. Then, when trying to evaluate another textbook, it's hard (impossible?) to go through that same experience and understand if you would have had an easier time with the material. There are definitely some obvious cases, but it isn't always. Second, sometimes people just have different learning styles and have a preference for them. Landau and Lifshitz has a reputation for being very hard (but rewarding!) to parse, and that is easily a showstopper for some people. Other books might only have relatively easy exercises (Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right, for example), which can help you gain a lot of confidence, while others might have many very difficult or very tedious problems. Some might have solutions to problems, some might not. Really, I think the best we can do is put a list of "top books" for each subject rather than the "best textbooks" for each subject.
- pow_pp_-1_v 8y ago
  Very true. How people learn depends on different factors like past knowledge, interest in the subject material etc. etc. But these lists do help in decreasing the search space when trying to find material to learn a new subject.
- gradys 8y ago
  This is likely why the author of this list only accepted submissions from people who had read at least two other textbooks on the topic.
  - asafira 8y ago
    I don't see why that fixes the issues I brought up --- if anything, I mention that it really isn't a good way to figure it out.
- robertk 8y ago
  I definitely agree that reading textbooks is not commutative with respect to ordering. I wonder whether there is any method for de-biasing from this pernicious effect? Other than, perhaps, split up a test and control group that reads A followed by B, or vice versa, and then debates what they have learned?
aj7 8y ago
On electrodynamics, madhadron recommends Purcell's Electricity and Magnetism over Griffith's Introduction to Electrodynamics, Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and others. Right on!!
zem 8y ago
surprised not to see morrison and boyd get a mention in the organic chemistry sector, at least as a contender. that was my pick for outstanding textbook across my entire academic career; they just presented the material so much better than i'd seen anyone else do on the topic.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
But, for instance, the linguistics recommendation is seemingly based on the remarks of one pseudo-anonymous commenter. And it's also hard to give such general recommendations for large subjects. Even at a more generalist level, do you want a really, really general overview of the broadest possible coverage? Or do you want a slightly more focussed overview that actually gets into somewhat more meaning information? Certainly for a course textbook, the former type isn't very useful at all.
memory_grep 8y ago
On the neuroscience recommendation: I had been reading Principles of Neural Science and decided to check out the recommendation, Neuroscience Exploring the Brain, and it actually does seem much better written and more informative/useful. Thanks for the link! Also, most of these texts are at library genesis: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
vladsanchez 8y ago
Clickbait!
amorphous 8y ago
The main idea from lesswrong is to prefer textbooks over other other books. More related to software, I have another rule: read the official documentation first before going somewhere else. Though often less polished than external books, it comes from the creator and it usually worth the effort.
- ethbro 8y ago
  Documentation of major products has definitely improved. As has tooling for producing and consuming it. When open source was getting rolling in the 90s I don't remember it being nearly so polished.
  - cheschire 8y ago
    Ah, you must not work on a Microsoft stack.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      Ha. Although you have to admit even modern MS documentation is loads better than it was historically. And at least there's some kind of acknowledged API now (even if the first class languages shift with the slightest breeze).
- frou_dh 8y ago
  Good reminder. The official Postgres manual instantly comes to mind whenever I think about great documentation. There's just something about the way it's split up, and especially the typical length of a leaf page, that makes it absurdly helpful. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/reference.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/reference.html
  - idontpost 8y ago
    And the fact that you can usually find the exact page you want from Google is nice. As a bonus, if google gives you the wrong version, that page links to the same page for every other version too. It's a joy.
xenihn 8y ago
Can anyone weigh in on the math recommendations?
- pphysch 8y ago
  The last (only?) recommendation for Numerical Analysis, "Numerical Recipes", is infamous for its poorly-written and hard to parse code examples. AFAIK some of it doesn't even compile.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  For Algebra, I'd rather recommend Aluffi's "Algebra Chapter 0". The prerequisites are maybe a passing knowledge of some algebra, but mostly start with fundamentals and develop the concepts through explanation and then interesting exercises. It's a joy to work through, but can occasionally be tough. For Analysis, I'd rather recommend Tao's "Analysis I". Tao has the style that I really enjoy where he uses a mix of intuition and light mathematical maturity to build basic Analysis from first principles. Not everyone benefits from this approach, but if you're the person who enjoys discussing and debating with the author as you develop the fundamentals, then Tao's Analysis is fantastic.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    Aluffi's book switches to the language of category theory way too early. The best introductory yet "serious" book on abstract algebra is A first course by Fraleigh; for topology, the book by Munkres is at the same level.
    - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
      I preferred that approach, personally. I felt the categorical treatment led to a bit more unified insight rather than treading each of the cases as independent with similarities we just "take note".
- rakkie 8y ago
  I found the Stumbling Robot list of math books to be a bit better. It lists multiple books for a number of topics and explains the differences / difficulty. http://www.stumblingrobot.com/best-math-books/ http://www.stumblingrobot.com/best-math-books/
z_open 8y ago
I tried reading the modern quantum mechanics book, but it seems very difficult off the bat. Seems like there is a lot they expect you to have a very heavy physics background already. I have a major in mechanical engineering and a minor in math so I figured I had enough to work my way through it, but I don't know any more. Anyone have a recommendation for a book that can ease me into it a little better?
- LolWolf 8y ago
  Hmm... both Messiah and Sakurai are usually at the graduate level. If you're fairly strong in math I'd recommend Messiah, but I can't recall off the top of my head whether there is a good chunk of physical knowledge expected. IIRC, it's a more axiomatic approach than most QM textbooks, so I'd pick this up (I believe Dover has a cheap version, but it's also available on PDF in most places). The usual undergraduate textbook that people recommend is Griffiths, though I definitely disagree with its usefulness (the book often opts for doing a bunch of calculations to 'get the intuition,' as opposed to explaining some points clearly, which is fine but I dislike this approach). If you're up for a fantastic, but quite dense, reading, Bohm's Quantum Theory holds a special place in my heart for its brilliant motivation and fairly clear exposition of foundational QM (note that it doesn't concern itself with the notion of Bohmian mechanics at all). This book sits on my bookshelf with hundreds of notes all over its pages. Of course, there is a good chunk of physics expected to be able to read this book, but you should skim it and skip to the chapters of interest as a good reference !
- weichi 8y ago
  I've read Griffiths, most of Shankar, some of Sakurai, and some of Feynman. Of those, I would say Griffiths is the best option for someone with your background. It's short enough that you have some hope of going through the entire book, and it has you doing real calculations. The writing is good. Shankar has lots of good stuff, but its 600+ pages long, so a bit overwhelming. I also found the explanations not as clear as in Griffiths. The perspective in Feynman and Sakurai is quite different than in Griffiths, and it is possibly a better approach. But Sakurai is much more challenging than Griffiths and not nearly as well written. Feynman lacks the worked examples and exercises that Griffiths has, so is not (IMO) appropriate as your sole textbook, but definitely worth looking at for the different perspective. A text taking the Feynman (or Sakurai) approach, but at the length and level of Griffiths, would be valuable. (I taught myself basic QM prior to going to grad school in physics, with a background similar to your, so I have some direct experience here. This was about 12 years ago. Perhaps there are better options now.)
cryptozeus 8y ago
As per author's recommendation I checked the alibris website for books on other subjects. Unfortunately top books in programming are C/Java/Algo & Cracking interview. https://www.alibris.com/search/books/subject/Computers-Programming https://www.alibris.com/search/books/subject/Computers-Progr...
molteanu 8y ago
Spivak's Calculus, oh, the memories! Logic at its finest. Definitely a nice maths book, as it is the place to learn how logical reasoning combined with fundamental concepts can be developed into a rigorous mathematical theory rather than a bunch of tools and techniques learned by rote. Combine with the oldish, but still unbeatable in their clarity and charisma, video lectures by Herbert Gross and you can have tons of pure, free fun.
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  The book is also beautifully typeset. A magnificent book.
- resource0x 8y ago
  Herbert Gross' videos - absolutely amazing work of art. Nostalgic sentiment as a bonus :)
akalin 8y ago
For math and physics textbooks, I find the Chicago undergraduate bibliographies quite useful: https://github.com/ystael/chicago-ug-math-bib https://github.com/ystael/chicago-ug-math-bib and https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicphys.htm https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicphys.htm
- nextos 8y ago
  Yes, in fact some recommendations at LW are odd: "On analysis in Rn, orthonormal recommends Strichartz's The Way of Analysis over Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis and Kolmogorov & Fomin's Introduction to Real Analysis." Rudin or Kolmogorov & Fomin are waaaay more advanced than Strichartz. If they wanted a more conceptual but still advanced book they could recommend e.g. Hubbard & Hubbard which is a marvelous book IMHO. I'd put it on par with SICP and CTM in terms of the enormous amount of ground it covers and the insights a novel reader can get.
ljw1001 8y ago
This book isn't a text book, and doesn't want to be, but for Fourier Analysis, "Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure" provides an introduction to the subject that, IMO, few books can match: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Fourier-Mathematical-Adventure-2nd/dp/0964350432 https://www.amazon.com/Who-Fourier-Mathematical-Adventure-2n...
AJRF 8y ago
How do I re-learn math up to a level just before say a US undergrad in Math? I hated math when I was in secondary-school, but loved computers so did a computer science course which was heavy-ish math in its final year. Passed that course and now am in a pretty decent programming role, but I feel like my maths is just built on such a shaky foundation that I maybe could improve my programming and problem solving if I solidified the base. Is there any one text book I could get which would teach me up to that level of Math? I suspect no, because Math is so broad, but generally if I could get an entire pre-university schooling in Math I would be very happy.
- hackermailman 8y ago
  Expii.com will work for algebra practice then choose any undergrad intro math text and try it, looking up things you don't remember as you go.
- ducttapecrown 8y ago
  Kahn Academy
- pkaye 8y ago
  Maybe go through the Khan Academy math courses. The organize it by grade level. Then you can see where you are lacking.
- yhoiseth 8y ago
  I’d use Khan Academy, which lets you build brick by brick from simple addition. The gamification is motivating, and you can’t fool yourself.
- 0xcafecafe 8y ago
  Khan academy would be a good resource for that. https://www.khanacademy.org/math https://www.khanacademy.org/math
- aj7 8y ago
  Choose s specific math subtopic relevant to your work and bust ass. For you, writing a program using new knowledge might be the best.
dooglius 8y ago
As others have noted, a survey isn’t a good indicator of quality, as it has more to do with what people learned from. An approach I have used in the past: given a field F, find universities best known in F, and see what textbooks they use in their courses.
bronlund 8y ago
This is stupid. Using popular vote to find best quality :D
carapace 8y ago
"Art of Electronics" Horowitz and Hill
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
fencepost 8y ago
I don't want the "best" textbook in a subject any more than I want the "best" editor[0]. "Best" is a really big judgement call. I want "widely accepted as great" or maybe even "good." Great or Good books may not cover exactly the same material, but any given one is likely to cover most of the material (all of the material that author/team considers most important) and avoid mistakes. [0] Vim, Emacs, Sublime2, Sublime3, Atom, VSCode, Scintilla-based stuff, various IDEs, etc.
andrepd 8y ago
Here are mine, from my area of study (physics). Quantum mechanics: Cohen-Tannoudji et al. Simply sublime. Read the first chapter and you will understand the physics of quantum mechanics. Read the second chapter and you will understand the mathematics. The rest of the book is a reference of nearly every basic topic in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Classical Mechanics: Landau and Lifshitz. Simply my kind of book. Terse, to the point, no faffing about, yet detailed and rich in discussion and physical insight. In other words, does not say anything it doesn't need, and doesn't omit anything that it shouldn't. QFT: Peskin and Schroeder. The clearest introduction I found of this difficult topic.
- boxcardavin 8y ago
  You a fan of Boas? Still have Mathermatical Methods open on my desk here at work.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    Never read that, I'm afraid. I used Arfken and Riley as my main practical mathematical reference works, throughout my degree.
jccalhoun 8y ago
I think the "best" is based on a lot of factors. I teach at a liberal arts college so the "best" book for me is an OER book because I don't want to charge my students for a book that some of them may not be able to afford. If there is something wrong or lacking in the book I tell my students what I think is right or missing. What I use: Public Speaking: http://www.publicspeakingproject.org/ http://www.publicspeakingproject.org/ Intro to Comm: http://kell.indstate.edu/public-comm-intro/ http://kell.indstate.edu/public-comm-intro/ (I helped revise this and edited together one of the chapter from existing OER chapters with my own material) Intro to Media Studies: http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=143 http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=143
- keithnz 8y ago
  I think most things that claim the "best" in categories which really don't have "best"s is mainly for the clickbait. They often end up being like the link... a recommendation with a bunch of other worthy recommendations
resource0x 8y ago
I would add "The Jazz Piano Book" by Mark Levine - for anyone learning music theory, even if you happen to hate jazz
drdrey 8y ago
Any recommendations for exercise physiology textbooks?
godelski 8y ago
Some of the books it is comparing are in completely different classes. For example it is comparing Griffiths Introduction to Electrodynamics and Jackson's Electrodynamics. You can't read Jackson if you haven't taken Griffiths or an equivalent! Jackson is a graduate textbook whereas Griffiths is undergraduate. And if you don't have a strong math background (knowing multivariate calculus and differential equations) neither of those are recommended. I think the hard thing about lists like this is that it doesn't specify who it is best for. At least compare books on the same level...
- Steuard 8y ago
  I was going to make exactly this same comment. (And the third text being compared was The Feynman Lectures, which is another entirely different sort of book and level.) This was the example that made me decide that this list's approach just wasn't useful the way that its author wanted it to be. I could take a stab at an actual list like this with better organization by recommending books for each course in the more or less standard undergraduate core physics curriculum, but I'm sure different professors would make different choices (and even for me, I know that my choices would be situation dependent). It's a hard problem, and it doesn't translate well to the very short summaries shown here.
  - godelski 8y ago
    > but I'm sure different professors would make different choices (and even for me, I know that my choices would be situation dependent). I think most of us would recommend books that we used. Or adamantly say "stay away from this one!" Like you said, it isn't easy. But there seem to be a few good options in each level, and usually only a few. I think the best thing to do would be to categorize them by level and say "Here's the most popular books, this is the one I recommend." It is impossible to be unbiased but I think that's about as close as you can expect to get.
  - ivan_ah 8y ago
    I'd love to hear which books you recommend for the core physics curriculum. I started working on such a list[1], but I feel out of my depth for certain courses because I did my UGRAD in Electrical Engineering and don't know the physics UGRAD curriculum that well, let along provide recommendations. [1] https://github.com/minireference/structure-api/blob/master/data/miniref/physics.yml https://github.com/minireference/structure-api/blob/master/d...
mettamage 8y ago
This will help a little, but if you scour HN, then you get the wisdom of crowds. Today I found a really short succinct book on ASP.net, it was exactly what I was looking for!
pash 8y ago
I’m a big fan of reading textbooks. I tend to buy and read several texts on the subjects that interest me most, and then continually to revisit each of them as my experience and knowledge in the subject broadens and deepens. But I feel like this sort of list is basically misguided, because the textbook that best suits a reader depends crucially on (a) the reader’s particular background and (b) the reader’s goals in learning a subject. Every textbook on a particular subject is written for a different target audience and emphasizes different aspects of the subject, so in addition to trying to identify overall quality of exposition, prospective readers should try to identify the text that best suits their knowledge and interests as they sit down to read. And after reading one text, a reader’s knowledge and interest in the subject should have changed substantially: his or her interest may be exhausted, but if it’s piqued the reader should then move on to another text that covers the subject more deeply or from a different perspective. In short, there is no such thing as a “best” textbook. There are good and bad texts, but they’re good and bad for different readers. Well, there are some texts that are just bad and will be bad for just about any reader, but the good ones are all good only for a certain subset of readers whose background in the subject and its prerequisites, and whose goals in learning it, best match what the author had in mind (or implicitly assumes).
- betenoire 8y ago
  Even so, the list is not misguided, it's pretty useful.
- JamesBarney 8y ago
  > But I feel like this sort of list is basically misguided, because the textbook that best suits a reader depends crucially on (a) the reader’s particular background and (b) the reader’s goals in learning a subject. This is why the list was great you got to read a bunch of reviews that didn't just talk about one book but compared them. With people making lots of comments about what they got out of each textbook.
8bitsrule 8y ago
In which 'Every' means a very limited subset of {EVERY}

823 points by Ibethewalrus 8y ago

> On business, joshkaufman recommends Kaufman's The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business over Bevelin's Seeking Wisdom and Munger's Poor Charlie's Alamanack. What a rat. Recommends his own book over two others. This is exactly what is wrong with University textbook selection. They're often just picking their friends, or someone who picked their textbook. Crooked and corrupt.

swanson 8y ago
Seeking Wisdom is also really, really good. Super approachable and underrated. The Personal MBA is also great, but I do agree that it's poor form for Josh to recommend his own book.
blairbeckwith 8y ago
Probably could have used a more clear disclosure, but it is probably one of the best books for a solid overview.
- jimrandomh 8y ago
  If you look at the comment where he makes that recommendation, it starts with: > "I'm the author, so feel free to discount appropriately." The process of consolidating all the recommendations into a list didn't leave room to say that sort of thing, though.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Add a star next to the item and a foot note or exclude your book from the list.
PacifyFish 8y ago
Have you read the book?
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  I have not. It very well could be true (which I do realize would be contrary to corruption). But I do not trust the jury of 1 composed of the author.
  - jrumbut 8y ago
    Having the best product and corrupt practices aren't mutually exclusive at all. I mean this in general, this example here where an author is promoting his own book without hiding his name is borderline. Says more about the site's reliability than the author's honesty to me.
Ibethewalrus 8y ago
Agree 100%. I submitted this post but arrived at the same conclusion with this book recommendation, also the author is way too young to have ample experience...
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Too young to have ample experience? He’s distilling the results of reading over a thousand books on various business topics into a book on what business is. You don’t need ample experience for that. You need the stamina to read, judge and summarise all those books and the good taste and writing ability to actually write it. It’s like the process of a journalist writing a book on a topic they have only the vaguest idea about, there’s a lot of reading and at some stage hopefully some understanding slips in. Except Josh has a business degree and worked at Procter & Gamble so he actually knew what he was on about before he started writing.
yontherubicon 8y ago
I can't say I blame him. I mean, if I thought someone had written a better book on a subject than I could, I doubt I'd bother writing the book!
- 394549 8y ago
  I kinda feel the most ethical thing for an author to do is focus on a recommendation for the best book that isn't theirs (e.g. besides my book X, I'd recommend Y for Z reasons).
  - komali2 8y ago
    Why would they have bothered writing the book if others existed? Or, if better books existed after they wrote theirs, why would they bother mentioning theirs at all?
    - macintux 8y ago
      You can acknowledge that someone else's book is well-written, accurate, and valuable even if you think yours is better, or has a different focus, or a different pedagogical method, or...
  - inetsee 8y ago
    The rules for the list don't say that an author can't recommend his/her own book. The rules do say that a recommender must explain why he/she recommends one book over others, which this author did.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  You shouldn't trust a book recommendation of the recommender doesn't explain why they are recommending it. If you write your own textbook, you had better be prepared to explain why your book is better than other books on the same subject.
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    The author did, though you may not find it satisfactory. In particular, people attacked him for recommending his book, with little specific counterargument ("it's terrible" isn't good enough). If they had engaged him in a dialog instead of insulting, maybe we'd have a better justification in the list.
ProAm 8y ago
> Crooked and corrupt. It's just business. Every business does it. Get used to it. Have an iPhone are forced to buy things from the App Store? Crooked and corrupt...? Bought a Tesla and cant use it for independent ride sharing? Crooked and corrupt? It's just business.
- 394549 8y ago
  >> Crooked and corrupt. > It's just business. Every business does it. Get used to it. No, that's how you get endemic corruption, which eventually leads to things like people dying from deliberately tainted food and shoddy medicine. Widespread intolerance of corruption and scams eventually builds a trustworthy environment that's better for everyone.
  - ProAm 8y ago
    It's just business. Recommending your own text book is not crooked and corrupt. It's business. Forcing your users to acquire all apps for your iPhone through your own app store is also not crooked and corrupt. It's just business. Everyone tolerates it because money talks.
    - 394549 8y ago
      > It's just business. Everyone tolerates it because money talks. Sometimes "business" must bow down to things like ethics, otherwise it tends towards corruption and exploitation. Hocking your own book in a list of the "best textbooks on every subject" is definitely a kind of corruption. It may get you some sales but it abuses the list and any trust placed in it. Recommendations like that should be made without such conflicts of interest. Also, repeating "it's just business" a bunch of times isn't a very good argument in favor of anything, it's nearly totally free of any content.
      - ProAm 8y ago
        > Sometimes "business" must bow down to things like ethics, otherwise it tends towards corruption and exploitation. That's if you get caught. On paper I completely agree with you, but in reality I think you'll find many many many businesses and industry that skirt ethically and moral behavior to cement their bottom line. I keep repeating its just business because it is, ultimately everything comes down to money especially in business. Is it inappropriate to charge people a higher price for an airline ticket because they browse your website with a macbook? It happens. What about amazon raising the price for an item because you've browsed it several times in the past already? Recommending your own book because you believe in its contents but also helps to put a roof over your head? It's all just business.
bsder 8y ago
> What a rat. Recommends his own book over two others. This is exactly what is wrong with University textbook selection. They're often just picking their friends, or someone who picked their textbook. Crooked and corrupt. My professor for Political Science recommended his own book. He also donated all of the money he would have made on it for our class into the general fund for the students. Which meant that he lost money because not everybody in the class bought the book. Textbooks are a racket. Especially the "rental" model which effectively admits that the textbook has zero utility beyond the class. However, the professors are neither the cause nor gaining the profits from that racket. The act of writing a textbook takes so much time and effort, that it really isn't profitable for the vast majority of professors.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
Well, to give credit where it's due, The Personal MBA is not a bad book. It has a slightly misleading title though. It should have been called "extremely short pieces about various aspects of business". The real value of it, at least for me, is inspiration. I read a small chapter (which is often just a page or half) and think how it relates to my actual situation. This gives me some food for thought, and very often for action, for a couple of days. Then I go back to the book, read the next piece, and so on. I sometimes disagree with the author, but it's a positive experience overall.
- ambicapter 8y ago
  God, I hate books like that. In my youth, I got on a freestyle kick (go watch Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme) and bought a book called 'How To Rap' because it was well reviewed. I was hoping for some sort of insight from the greats. It was entirely made of just quotes from different rappers. Barely any structure whatsoever.
  - jkchu 8y ago
    I am partway through reading The Personal MBA, and the book of quotes you mentions sound very, very different. Sure, The Personal MBA is not a deep dive into any subject (it's not meant to be) but it's got a lot more meat than just quotes from other textbooks.
blackstache 8y ago
We likely agree on the larger sentiment here, but in fairness to the author I think the context of the post makes this more acceptable. The textbook recommendations are all submitted in the comments below the compiled list, and the author's own submission[0] includes at least a disclaimer and a justification for why the author felt the need to write the book. 0: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject#cxfYBFGhbbP7TgQ4c https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t... Edit: I have not read this book or any others in the domain, just wanted to add some context I did not already see in this thread.
jkchu 8y ago
While I agree that it's not "in good taste" to recommend your own book like this. I feel your reaction is a bit harsh and did not consider that he actually gave disclosure upon recommending the book.

fady 8y ago

The link does not work for me. Anyone else having the same issue?

maerF0x0 8y ago
It eventually does, just keep trying.
dguo 8y ago
Same here. I tried the home page, but it's not loading either.
kevinoid 8y ago
Same here. It's available on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180726150520/https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject https://web.archive.org/web/20180726150520/https://www.lessw... Note that I had to disable JavaScript to prevent it from hiding the content and displaying "Sorry, we couldn't find what you were looking for."
mark3141 8y ago
Works for me
habryka 8y ago
(Main Dev of site here: Sorry for that! I should really get around to setting up autoscaling. Site should now be properly available again.)
- ma2rten 8y ago
  Actually you should probably set up a CDN. There is no need to serve pages that are the same for every visitor from your server.
- Jach 8y ago
  I've been out of the loop a long time -- did the backend change along with the frontend? I remember LW links surviving HN hugs before...

xd2024 8y ago

I don't think the author has read two other lists of best textbooks... dubious methodology

jimrandomh 8y ago

Alternate link with better caching: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-bes...

Daycrawler2 8y ago

Not that I have specific issues with the recommendations there, but from a conceptual standpoint, why should I trust recommendations on every subjects from a centralized non-specialized site when I can search for sites specialized in each subjects and take their recommendations on their own subjects instead.

maxmcd 8y ago
To me, this article strongly recommends reading textbooks and softly recommends this list. They even go into detail about what methods should be used to validate textbooks generally!
hyperpape 8y ago
I share your doubts. For instance, I have a URL saved on my home computer where the (admittedly non-universal) HN consensus was that the CLRS algorithms book recommended here is not a great one to learn from. However, I think your faith that it's easy to find good recommendations by subject matter experts underestimates the difficulty of finding them in the mass of things on the internet. To take one example, I remember reading a post about two approaches to denotational semantics, along with recommendations about the best textbooks, but have never subsequently been able to find that link.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ipcac 8y ago
If you input the term "discrete mathematics" in the search field "Books" on Amazon, you get about 15 books (not counting the advertised ones) per page and 101 pages of those. If you slightly change criteria (change the search field by subject or tweak the date or add another term to "discrete mathematics" or ...), you get even more hits (many more). This is essentially a bottomless well. Most books found in this way (many of them incredibly good) will never be found in the lists like that offered by OP for many reasons: lists like that of OP favor 'classics", every month there's a new book on the market that tries to outdo the existing ones, etc Many writers of the newer books are aware of the existence of the classics (in fact, many had to learn from them), so in their books they point out the pitfalls, fill in the holes, add more details and make your learning experience all around more pleasant. The books in the OP's list might not work for everyone, so you have to do your own searching, sorting and analysis. This is especially true if you are a self-learner and much more so if the subject you want to learn is math because in math you are the one who has to prove every one of your assertions and be as independent as possible. tl; dr: don't worry about the "expert opinion". Instead collect data, clean it, analyze it and the consume the parts you need. That way you avoid 'expertise' that comes bundled with traditionalisms, bureaucracy, calcified thinking and other undesirable bullshit.

Jtsummers 8y ago

Anyone here read the "Thinking in Systems" book? systems thinking seems to be surprisingly absent from many professional developers and engineers. Or, they lack the ability to abstract properly beyond their specific domains. I'm trying to improve this in my office and would like to find some books to hand out to people (particularly some of the more promising young folks, influence them before they get stuck in a bad mode of thought). Based on the Amazon reviews it seems like it might be the sort of book I'm looking for, I'll continue to check through those and for other reviews later.

mpax 8y ago
complexitylabs.io offers plenty of gentle introductory material.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  Interesting. I'll check out the courses they have over the weekend. I appreciate the link.
alexashka 8y ago
I don't find it anymore surprising than interest in mathematics being absent from many people. The solution to your surprise will be a re-calibration of the expectations you have, not them magically becoming more like you :)
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  A brain dump of my thoughts on this follows: http://www.thinking.net/Systems_Thinking/OverviewSTarticle.pdf http://www.thinking.net/Systems_Thinking/OverviewSTarticle.p... Kind of gets at what I'm wanting to convey to people. Often (especially with technical people) we focus on a narrow thing. I have a problem, I will fix it. We don't examine the environment in which the problem exists to actually understand its causes and impacts. Maybe my problem is actually not a problem for the organization, it may actually be a benefit. Example: A friend works in aircraft maintenance. They do something called "bonded repair", using adhesives to apply patches rather than other techniques. It's remarkably effective. But when the patch is later removed during a big maintenance effort, the technicians have to remove the remaining adhesives. They've been given a plastic (consumable) tool, it's slow and breaks but they're cheap and ultimately effective. The technicians look at the "problem" (too slow, breaks) and go find a metal tool. It's faster, doesn't break, they can get the whole area cleared by lunch. Great! No! The metal tool introduces scratches. Scratches become failure points in the future so they have to be repaired before the aircraft is released. The local optimum introduced a 2-week delay in releasing every aircraft while damage detection and repair was conducted. And potentially worse failures in the future if the scratches aren't detected. A systems thinker would examine the whole of the operation before solving their local problem. This is the thing I want to convey to my colleagues. For developers, the locally (to you or maybe even your team) optimal decision to use language X may seem great. But then it turns out you aren't the one maintaining it in 5 years. Your choice to use Rust in 2011 was ok. But now in 2018 none of your code compiles because of changes to the language in the intervening 7 years [0]. Now the maintainers have to rewrite things, or stick with a now very outdated and potentially unstable compiler and tool suite. C++ may have been unpleasant to use, but it may have been a better choice within the environment of the decision. Other times, by not applying systems thinking, you find yourself solving the same or similar problems over and over. Perhaps your code review process is incomplete, or your use of version control is non-existent or haphazard. Have you ever been in a shop where the same damn bug showed up every second or third build? Why? Because they solved the problem (the bug) but failed to understand the process and systemic problems that permitted the regression in the first place. And if that regression-permission-failure isn't addressed, other regressions will happen in the future and may go undetected. ===== Long story short: Systems engineering applies systems thinking to the design and development of, well, systems. Software engineers should definitely study it, at least if they want to be called engineers. But systems thinking is a component of systems engineering that can go way beyond that one area in terms of applications. The more people can view things this way, the better off your team, your office, your company, your world can be. My problem is not just conveying the value of it (I have anecdotes galore), but actually bringing people up to the level where they can do it themselves, independent of my prodding and guiding. ===== [0] Not a dig on Rust. They've stabilized the language specification, but this is a thing that can and does happen.

asafira 8y ago

I have to admit that I have often disagreed with others over what textbooks are best, but I think that's natural. For one, you often start a field with a specific book. If you pour a lot of time into that book, you often feel more attached to it. Then, when trying to evaluate another textbook, it's hard (impossible?) to go through that same experience and understand if you would have had an easier time with the material. There are definitely some obvious cases, but it isn't always. Second, sometimes people just have different learning styles and have a preference for them. Landau and Lifshitz has a reputation for being very hard (but rewarding!) to parse, and that is easily a showstopper for some people. Other books might only have relatively easy exercises (Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right, for example), which can help you gain a lot of confidence, while others might have many very difficult or very tedious problems. Some might have solutions to problems, some might not. Really, I think the best we can do is put a list of "top books" for each subject rather than the "best textbooks" for each subject.

pow_pp_-1_v 8y ago
Very true. How people learn depends on different factors like past knowledge, interest in the subject material etc. etc. But these lists do help in decreasing the search space when trying to find material to learn a new subject.
gradys 8y ago
This is likely why the author of this list only accepted submissions from people who had read at least two other textbooks on the topic.
- asafira 8y ago
  I don't see why that fixes the issues I brought up --- if anything, I mention that it really isn't a good way to figure it out.
robertk 8y ago
I definitely agree that reading textbooks is not commutative with respect to ordering. I wonder whether there is any method for de-biasing from this pernicious effect? Other than, perhaps, split up a test and control group that reads A followed by B, or vice versa, and then debates what they have learned?

aj7 8y ago

On electrodynamics, madhadron recommends Purcell's Electricity and Magnetism over Griffith's Introduction to Electrodynamics, Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and others. Right on!!

zem 8y ago

surprised not to see morrison and boyd get a mention in the organic chemistry sector, at least as a contender. that was my pick for outstanding textbook across my entire academic career; they just presented the material so much better than i'd seen anyone else do on the topic.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

But, for instance, the linguistics recommendation is seemingly based on the remarks of one pseudo-anonymous commenter. And it's also hard to give such general recommendations for large subjects. Even at a more generalist level, do you want a really, really general overview of the broadest possible coverage? Or do you want a slightly more focussed overview that actually gets into somewhat more meaning information? Certainly for a course textbook, the former type isn't very useful at all.

memory_grep 8y ago

On the neuroscience recommendation: I had been reading Principles of Neural Science and decided to check out the recommendation, Neuroscience Exploring the Brain, and it actually does seem much better written and more informative/useful. Thanks for the link! Also, most of these texts are at library genesis: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

vladsanchez 8y ago

Clickbait!

amorphous 8y ago

The main idea from lesswrong is to prefer textbooks over other other books. More related to software, I have another rule: read the official documentation first before going somewhere else. Though often less polished than external books, it comes from the creator and it usually worth the effort.

ethbro 8y ago
Documentation of major products has definitely improved. As has tooling for producing and consuming it. When open source was getting rolling in the 90s I don't remember it being nearly so polished.
- cheschire 8y ago
  Ah, you must not work on a Microsoft stack.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Ha. Although you have to admit even modern MS documentation is loads better than it was historically. And at least there's some kind of acknowledged API now (even if the first class languages shift with the slightest breeze).
frou_dh 8y ago
Good reminder. The official Postgres manual instantly comes to mind whenever I think about great documentation. There's just something about the way it's split up, and especially the typical length of a leaf page, that makes it absurdly helpful. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/index.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/reference.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/reference.html
- idontpost 8y ago
  And the fact that you can usually find the exact page you want from Google is nice. As a bonus, if google gives you the wrong version, that page links to the same page for every other version too. It's a joy.

xenihn 8y ago

Can anyone weigh in on the math recommendations?

pphysch 8y ago
The last (only?) recommendation for Numerical Analysis, "Numerical Recipes", is infamous for its poorly-written and hard to parse code examples. AFAIK some of it doesn't even compile.
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
For Algebra, I'd rather recommend Aluffi's "Algebra Chapter 0". The prerequisites are maybe a passing knowledge of some algebra, but mostly start with fundamentals and develop the concepts through explanation and then interesting exercises. It's a joy to work through, but can occasionally be tough. For Analysis, I'd rather recommend Tao's "Analysis I". Tao has the style that I really enjoy where he uses a mix of intuition and light mathematical maturity to build basic Analysis from first principles. Not everyone benefits from this approach, but if you're the person who enjoys discussing and debating with the author as you develop the fundamentals, then Tao's Analysis is fantastic.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Aluffi's book switches to the language of category theory way too early. The best introductory yet "serious" book on abstract algebra is A first course by Fraleigh; for topology, the book by Munkres is at the same level.
  - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    I preferred that approach, personally. I felt the categorical treatment led to a bit more unified insight rather than treading each of the cases as independent with similarities we just "take note".
rakkie 8y ago
I found the Stumbling Robot list of math books to be a bit better. It lists multiple books for a number of topics and explains the differences / difficulty. http://www.stumblingrobot.com/best-math-books/ http://www.stumblingrobot.com/best-math-books/

z_open 8y ago

I tried reading the modern quantum mechanics book, but it seems very difficult off the bat. Seems like there is a lot they expect you to have a very heavy physics background already. I have a major in mechanical engineering and a minor in math so I figured I had enough to work my way through it, but I don't know any more. Anyone have a recommendation for a book that can ease me into it a little better?

LolWolf 8y ago
Hmm... both Messiah and Sakurai are usually at the graduate level. If you're fairly strong in math I'd recommend Messiah, but I can't recall off the top of my head whether there is a good chunk of physical knowledge expected. IIRC, it's a more axiomatic approach than most QM textbooks, so I'd pick this up (I believe Dover has a cheap version, but it's also available on PDF in most places). The usual undergraduate textbook that people recommend is Griffiths, though I definitely disagree with its usefulness (the book often opts for doing a bunch of calculations to 'get the intuition,' as opposed to explaining some points clearly, which is fine but I dislike this approach). If you're up for a fantastic, but quite dense, reading, Bohm's Quantum Theory holds a special place in my heart for its brilliant motivation and fairly clear exposition of foundational QM (note that it doesn't concern itself with the notion of Bohmian mechanics at all). This book sits on my bookshelf with hundreds of notes all over its pages. Of course, there is a good chunk of physics expected to be able to read this book, but you should skim it and skip to the chapters of interest as a good reference !
weichi 8y ago
I've read Griffiths, most of Shankar, some of Sakurai, and some of Feynman. Of those, I would say Griffiths is the best option for someone with your background. It's short enough that you have some hope of going through the entire book, and it has you doing real calculations. The writing is good. Shankar has lots of good stuff, but its 600+ pages long, so a bit overwhelming. I also found the explanations not as clear as in Griffiths. The perspective in Feynman and Sakurai is quite different than in Griffiths, and it is possibly a better approach. But Sakurai is much more challenging than Griffiths and not nearly as well written. Feynman lacks the worked examples and exercises that Griffiths has, so is not (IMO) appropriate as your sole textbook, but definitely worth looking at for the different perspective. A text taking the Feynman (or Sakurai) approach, but at the length and level of Griffiths, would be valuable. (I taught myself basic QM prior to going to grad school in physics, with a background similar to your, so I have some direct experience here. This was about 12 years ago. Perhaps there are better options now.)

cryptozeus 8y ago

As per author's recommendation I checked the alibris website for books on other subjects. Unfortunately top books in programming are C/Java/Algo & Cracking interview. https://www.alibris.com/search/books/subject/Computers-Programming https://www.alibris.com/search/books/subject/Computers-Progr...

molteanu 8y ago

Spivak's Calculus, oh, the memories! Logic at its finest. Definitely a nice maths book, as it is the place to learn how logical reasoning combined with fundamental concepts can be developed into a rigorous mathematical theory rather than a bunch of tools and techniques learned by rote. Combine with the oldish, but still unbeatable in their clarity and charisma, video lectures by Herbert Gross and you can have tons of pure, free fun.

oldgradstudent 8y ago
The book is also beautifully typeset. A magnificent book.
resource0x 8y ago
Herbert Gross' videos - absolutely amazing work of art. Nostalgic sentiment as a bonus :)

akalin 8y ago

For math and physics textbooks, I find the Chicago undergraduate bibliographies quite useful: https://github.com/ystael/chicago-ug-math-bib https://github.com/ystael/chicago-ug-math-bib and https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicphys.htm https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicphys.htm

nextos 8y ago
Yes, in fact some recommendations at LW are odd: "On analysis in Rn, orthonormal recommends Strichartz's The Way of Analysis over Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis and Kolmogorov & Fomin's Introduction to Real Analysis." Rudin or Kolmogorov & Fomin are waaaay more advanced than Strichartz. If they wanted a more conceptual but still advanced book they could recommend e.g. Hubbard & Hubbard which is a marvelous book IMHO. I'd put it on par with SICP and CTM in terms of the enormous amount of ground it covers and the insights a novel reader can get.

ljw1001 8y ago

This book isn't a text book, and doesn't want to be, but for Fourier Analysis, "Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure" provides an introduction to the subject that, IMO, few books can match: https://www.amazon.com/Who-Fourier-Mathematical-Adventure-2nd/dp/0964350432 https://www.amazon.com/Who-Fourier-Mathematical-Adventure-2n...

AJRF 8y ago

How do I re-learn math up to a level just before say a US undergrad in Math? I hated math when I was in secondary-school, but loved computers so did a computer science course which was heavy-ish math in its final year. Passed that course and now am in a pretty decent programming role, but I feel like my maths is just built on such a shaky foundation that I maybe could improve my programming and problem solving if I solidified the base. Is there any one text book I could get which would teach me up to that level of Math? I suspect no, because Math is so broad, but generally if I could get an entire pre-university schooling in Math I would be very happy.

hackermailman 8y ago
Expii.com will work for algebra practice then choose any undergrad intro math text and try it, looking up things you don't remember as you go.
ducttapecrown 8y ago
Kahn Academy
pkaye 8y ago
Maybe go through the Khan Academy math courses. The organize it by grade level. Then you can see where you are lacking.
yhoiseth 8y ago
I’d use Khan Academy, which lets you build brick by brick from simple addition. The gamification is motivating, and you can’t fool yourself.
0xcafecafe 8y ago
Khan academy would be a good resource for that. https://www.khanacademy.org/math https://www.khanacademy.org/math
aj7 8y ago
Choose s specific math subtopic relevant to your work and bust ass. For you, writing a program using new knowledge might be the best.

dooglius 8y ago

As others have noted, a survey isn’t a good indicator of quality, as it has more to do with what people learned from. An approach I have used in the past: given a field F, find universities best known in F, and see what textbooks they use in their courses.

bronlund 8y ago

This is stupid. Using popular vote to find best quality :D

carapace 8y ago

"Art of Electronics" Horowitz and Hill

deleted 8y ago

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fencepost 8y ago

I don't want the "best" textbook in a subject any more than I want the "best" editor[0]. "Best" is a really big judgement call. I want "widely accepted as great" or maybe even "good." Great or Good books may not cover exactly the same material, but any given one is likely to cover most of the material (all of the material that author/team considers most important) and avoid mistakes. [0] Vim, Emacs, Sublime2, Sublime3, Atom, VSCode, Scintilla-based stuff, various IDEs, etc.

andrepd 8y ago

Here are mine, from my area of study (physics). Quantum mechanics: Cohen-Tannoudji et al. Simply sublime. Read the first chapter and you will understand the physics of quantum mechanics. Read the second chapter and you will understand the mathematics. The rest of the book is a reference of nearly every basic topic in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Classical Mechanics: Landau and Lifshitz. Simply my kind of book. Terse, to the point, no faffing about, yet detailed and rich in discussion and physical insight. In other words, does not say anything it doesn't need, and doesn't omit anything that it shouldn't. QFT: Peskin and Schroeder. The clearest introduction I found of this difficult topic.

boxcardavin 8y ago
You a fan of Boas? Still have Mathermatical Methods open on my desk here at work.
- andrepd 8y ago
  Never read that, I'm afraid. I used Arfken and Riley as my main practical mathematical reference works, throughout my degree.

jccalhoun 8y ago

I think the "best" is based on a lot of factors. I teach at a liberal arts college so the "best" book for me is an OER book because I don't want to charge my students for a book that some of them may not be able to afford. If there is something wrong or lacking in the book I tell my students what I think is right or missing. What I use: Public Speaking: http://www.publicspeakingproject.org/ http://www.publicspeakingproject.org/ Intro to Comm: http://kell.indstate.edu/public-comm-intro/ http://kell.indstate.edu/public-comm-intro/ (I helped revise this and edited together one of the chapter from existing OER chapters with my own material) Intro to Media Studies: http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=143 http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/BookDetail.aspx?bookId=143

keithnz 8y ago
I think most things that claim the "best" in categories which really don't have "best"s is mainly for the clickbait. They often end up being like the link... a recommendation with a bunch of other worthy recommendations

resource0x 8y ago

I would add "The Jazz Piano Book" by Mark Levine - for anyone learning music theory, even if you happen to hate jazz

drdrey 8y ago

Any recommendations for exercise physiology textbooks?

godelski 8y ago

Some of the books it is comparing are in completely different classes. For example it is comparing Griffiths Introduction to Electrodynamics and Jackson's Electrodynamics. You can't read Jackson if you haven't taken Griffiths or an equivalent! Jackson is a graduate textbook whereas Griffiths is undergraduate. And if you don't have a strong math background (knowing multivariate calculus and differential equations) neither of those are recommended. I think the hard thing about lists like this is that it doesn't specify who it is best for. At least compare books on the same level...

Steuard 8y ago
I was going to make exactly this same comment. (And the third text being compared was The Feynman Lectures, which is another entirely different sort of book and level.) This was the example that made me decide that this list's approach just wasn't useful the way that its author wanted it to be. I could take a stab at an actual list like this with better organization by recommending books for each course in the more or less standard undergraduate core physics curriculum, but I'm sure different professors would make different choices (and even for me, I know that my choices would be situation dependent). It's a hard problem, and it doesn't translate well to the very short summaries shown here.
- godelski 8y ago
  > but I'm sure different professors would make different choices (and even for me, I know that my choices would be situation dependent). I think most of us would recommend books that we used. Or adamantly say "stay away from this one!" Like you said, it isn't easy. But there seem to be a few good options in each level, and usually only a few. I think the best thing to do would be to categorize them by level and say "Here's the most popular books, this is the one I recommend." It is impossible to be unbiased but I think that's about as close as you can expect to get.
- ivan_ah 8y ago
  I'd love to hear which books you recommend for the core physics curriculum. I started working on such a list[1], but I feel out of my depth for certain courses because I did my UGRAD in Electrical Engineering and don't know the physics UGRAD curriculum that well, let along provide recommendations. [1] https://github.com/minireference/structure-api/blob/master/data/miniref/physics.yml https://github.com/minireference/structure-api/blob/master/d...

mettamage 8y ago

This will help a little, but if you scour HN, then you get the wisdom of crowds. Today I found a really short succinct book on ASP.net, it was exactly what I was looking for!

pash 8y ago

I’m a big fan of reading textbooks. I tend to buy and read several texts on the subjects that interest me most, and then continually to revisit each of them as my experience and knowledge in the subject broadens and deepens. But I feel like this sort of list is basically misguided, because the textbook that best suits a reader depends crucially on (a) the reader’s particular background and (b) the reader’s goals in learning a subject. Every textbook on a particular subject is written for a different target audience and emphasizes different aspects of the subject, so in addition to trying to identify overall quality of exposition, prospective readers should try to identify the text that best suits their knowledge and interests as they sit down to read. And after reading one text, a reader’s knowledge and interest in the subject should have changed substantially: his or her interest may be exhausted, but if it’s piqued the reader should then move on to another text that covers the subject more deeply or from a different perspective. In short, there is no such thing as a “best” textbook. There are good and bad texts, but they’re good and bad for different readers. Well, there are some texts that are just bad and will be bad for just about any reader, but the good ones are all good only for a certain subset of readers whose background in the subject and its prerequisites, and whose goals in learning it, best match what the author had in mind (or implicitly assumes).

betenoire 8y ago
Even so, the list is not misguided, it's pretty useful.
JamesBarney 8y ago
> But I feel like this sort of list is basically misguided, because the textbook that best suits a reader depends crucially on (a) the reader’s particular background and (b) the reader’s goals in learning a subject. This is why the list was great you got to read a bunch of reviews that didn't just talk about one book but compared them. With people making lots of comments about what they got out of each textbook.

8bitsrule 8y ago

In which 'Every' means a very limited subset of {EVERY}