3 ms·

yikes we got some pitchforks in this comment section

• blooalien 3y ago
  I prefer torches. Cleanse it with fire!
• goku12 3y ago
  Anybody here without a pitchfork here is someone who hasn't gone to a university, a college or self-taught.
  • EvgeniyZh 3y ago
    I guess US university? I barely needed LibGen during my undergrad. Either lecture notes, free resources only, or physical library were sufficient most of the time. Definitely no "we use edition X, you have to buy it" bullshit. As a grad student I find that many relevant books (e.g., Springer) are available via uni subscription, or some pre-print version is available for free. Libgen is useful and textbook publishers are nuts, but educational organizations are enabling them and they could do that less, surely for below-grad-level material
    • goku12 3y ago
      I graduated from an Indian university. This situation was better, but not significantly. The syllabus is mostly adapted from US universities and generally prescribes the same textbooks. These US books are exorbitantly costly in Indian currency (due to difference in purchase power parity), so many books have cheaper prints exclusive to the Indian subcontinent. They are still costly and there are books that don't have a cheap edition. It's often outside the budget of students. Libraries help - but there aren't enough copies for all students. This problem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that there are books by local authors designed around the syllabus with the semester exams in focus. Those books are more similar to lecture notes. My experience though, is that those books are mostly good only for rote learning. You need to refer the prescribed textbooks to get any reasonable insight. And then there are books not in syllabus that offer much deeper insight. So - the situation is better than in US, but not significantly. On a tangent, the tendency of Indian universities adopting syllabus from its US counterparts leads to use of proprietary software like Matlab. Software companies in US supply student version of their software and often tie up with the university to get it into the syllabus. But its much harder for Indian students to access the same software. Some universities have identified this problem and have recently started prescribing open source software like Julia and KiCad.