How can I get list of textbooks being used in top colleges? | Hacker News Reader

How can I get list of textbooks being used in top colleges?

63 pointslifeplusplus38 comments

Let's say I wanted to find out what textbooks are being used in stanford graduate finance degree or something like that. How can I go about finding that out.

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Consider searching .edu sites for syllabi - every syllabus I have ever received had the required textbooks on it.

You could also try searching for ISBN's on university domains, but I imagine this will be less consistent.

My university partnered with Barnes and Noble and published a list of required books per course as a bundle option. If a course catalog is available you can further refine your search based on course numbers (like FIN 4401 or CSE 4096, etc). Look for any partnerships a university has with a bookseller.

Those are some thoughts... good luck!

With the increased use of closed Web portals, whether bespoke (or more likely, OEM rebranded), or third-party, access to basic course information is increasingly difficult, often hitting a password-protected registration wall.

Emailing faculty or departments directly may offer (occasional) success, as can tracking down reader lists at campus bookstore websites.

There seems to have been a brief golden decade of roughly 2002--2012 when handcrafted professor homepages included course lists and syllabi at least at major universities, both public and private. It's grown markedly worse in recent years.

Open Courseware, under that name frequently, is an exception. M.I.T., Harvard, Stanford, and Cal Berkeley, off the top of my head. CUNY and Columbia likely as well.

It's a pleasure to find a well maintained website by a professor where all course materials is available in simple well organized format.

For most universities, find the general catalogue or equivalent, which will list courses, often major / graduate requirements by department, course numbers, offer dates, and frequently, teaching faculty.

For Stanford https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/

Across the bay, it's http://guide.berkeley.edu/courses/

Plugging in course numbers, restricted to domain, and keywords "syllabus", "assigned reading", or similar, often works. I'm not above emailing faculty or departments directly.

Readings, especialy in graduate courses, often comprise of articles rather than standard texts. For these, a course-specific reference (syllabus) is often necessary.

doesn't work for stanford everything requires password

My technique: most have bookstore integrations. Use their bookstore website by plugging in each course code and it should spit out the corresponding books when applicable.

I think this is the way to go. The only central database where I officially put my textbook choices on record is the bookstore order. The department collects syllabi, but they aren't centralized beyond that, and they make no effort to standardize the format.

If you are interested in just a small number of courses just Googling it will surely tell you what the book is. But for a school-wide list the bookstore is probably the only option.

something new, I didn't know. since my college didn't have online book store at the time

Useful for texts, less so for readers / article-lists.

https://opensyllabus.org/

There's no way to get the raw data from this site, is there? I have long been interested in doing some analysis of how syllabi have changed over time, but that doesn't seem possible with this interface.

I remember seeing a post on their blog about exactly this. I cannot find it now but if you dig around you might find the data dumps.

unless im missing how to use this site, it doesn't work.. click stanford and it only lets you click computer science or literature all other subjects are greyed out

Go to the website for the department. For public colleges the syllabi have to be available. Sometimes this means poking an administrator.

But remember, they are top schools usually in spite of, not because of, the textbook selection.

For public colleges the syllabi have to be available.

Untrue.

They may be, but the practice seems to be fading.

stanford literally has website dedicated to syllabus but all password protected

https://syllabus.stanford.edu/syllabus/#/mainSyllabus

Stanford is private.

The "requirement" claim is rubbish regardless.

See MIT OCW coursework. It is usually pretty in line with what they use there.

Regarding the OP's specific question, I actually had the a similar thought a few months ago and tracked down the book used in Andrew Lo's finance class at MIT Sloan (via OpenCourseWare). It's the "standard" investments textbook by Bodie, Kane, and Marcus.

The best method is the university's bookstore. For Columbia for example, go to https://columbia.bncollege.com/shop/columbia/home Then, Textbooks > Find Textbooks, Select Department, Course etc.

You'll see that there are weird code names for each course, and these can easily be found on the Courses page e.g. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb/

An example would be Department: COMS (Computer Science), Course: W3251, Section: 001

I'd imagine the case is similar for other colleges.

For Stanford, you can start here: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/.This should give you enough information about the various classes and their professors/lecturers. From there you can try searching for the course numbers on google. Most will have a website that hosts most of the material you may be interested in.

I've used this site in the past: https://www.doradolist.com/universities.html

I think it only covers STEM subjects, which is unfortunate in your case. Still, maybe others on HN will find it useful.

Can you google the course web page? Most of mine are public and include the textbooks

that requires you know what courses are in a degree and what is their course number

True but that's also public knowledge for my degree

MIT OpenCourseWare is great, you can read course materials and syllabi (syllabuses?) which tell you what books the course uses.

The course sites are public right? Pay someone off upwork or mechanical turk manually scrape these sites for you.

I Google syllabuses for whatever I want to learn and then look up whatever readings are suggested.

Find who is teaching it and it’s the book they wrote on the topic ;) kidding

You can try going to the subreddit of the school and asks for it.

i find using slides or scribe notes from classes to be way more valuable -- professor webpages will often aggregate these

how do you fine those professor sites

If you want to self study graduate courses you have to learn to figure out things yourself.

that was helpful

You can try looking at a Staff directory for each department. They usually have the professor's photo, contact information, and maybe a link to their professorial website.

cab.brown.edu

COURSES @ BROWN: https://cab.brown.edu/

one of the best sites when it comes to UI thanks

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