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Comment by Hasz | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who tells you can "learn" math and pyhsics by just watching videos is lying to you. There is no substitute for actually doing lots of problems.

Pick a book, pick a pace to work through it, and spend a few months going through it. Do the exercises in the back of each chapter, work through the solutions, and ask around if you still can't figure it out. Persistance and routine are key here.

As for books, I like Stewart's Calculus, Lay's Linear Algebra, and Hammack's Book of Proof.

For physics, I don't know what your background is. Giancoli is a popular undergrad freshman year book, where as griffith's electrodynamics is a bit more advanced.

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I second this but starting to watch actual undergrad lecture series is beneficial because sometimes the book your working through May just be missing that one piece of the puzzle you need to start getting enough of a grip to solve a problem.

Also with physics, you need some tricks that are usually done in derivations or calculations (cause not everything can just be solved) and those do not necessarily appear in a book - but they do in lectures.

Edit: the book gives you the fundamentals though on which you work. also, they will teach you the necessary abstraction - the first thing standing in my way of a degree in physics was my intuition and need to picture stuff. working a lot with differential geometry now, I've got some of that visualization back but with linear algebra even and quantum mechanics it can stand in your way.

This!

For the programmers in the house, it would be like claiming you can code python if you’ve never coded before but watched some videos of expert teachers explaining the structure of python programming.

I often see people here on HN saying classroom lectures are more important than homework. But in my experience the real intuitive learning (at least for math and physics) doesn’t come until you’ve spent some time banging your head trying to figure things out solving problems (ie, applying the theory).

One text (Wangsness E&M maybe) had a great student quote, roughly “I understand the principles but I can’t do the problems.”

Giancoli's book doesn't use calculus. Halliday & Resnick (or one of its later updates from Crane) is a better bet in this regard.

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