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Comment by magnio | Hacker News Reader

Everyone's gonna inundate you with their 20 favorite textbooks when you have such a general question.

For me, books for self-studying should have a slightly informal tone and ramble a little. The book is your teacher, and I'd like my teacher to speak to me as a student, not a theorem prover, as least when I'm starting. Spivak, Pugh and Axler are some good examples, while I could only grok Rudin after learning all the basic.

Not a lot of experience with physics but I like Symon's Classical Mechanics and Purcell for the same reason. Kleppner's mechanics book has very good exercises too.

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Spivak’s Calculus is the best-written textbook I’ve ever encountered and one of the more beautiful examples of book design also.

I like Spivak's Calculus but I think it's a lot of effort to learn Calculus from (probably very rewarding though). I've currently been studying from Real Analysis 1 by Terrance Tao and I find the explanations to be great, https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811017896.

For formal engineering, Calculus, Sixth Edition, by Earl Swokowski, Michael Olinick, and Dennis D. Pence is the ultimate book to use. Also, my twin brother used it to teach himself Calculus 2.

Swokowski wrote phenomenal books, in math, just in general.

All Spivak books are masterpieces (including the last one about physics).

By "Axler", you surely mean the one with the catchy title, about linear algebra. I find it unbearable. The book says: "determinants are difficult and nonintuitive"; anybody who understands determinants: "man, it's the damn area and volume".

Yes indeed. Purcell’s Electricity and Magnetism book is so good, I could understand E & M from a sophisticated point of you even though I could do vector calculus only on very symmetrical situations. And Kleppner/Kolenkow books and Anthony French books are well written.

This is why I loved Griffith's introduction to electromagnetism.

Thanks! I appreciate the reccomendations.

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