The Best Textbooks on Every Subject | Hacker News Reader

The Best Textbooks on Every Subject

lesswrong.com

383 pointsolalonde62 comments

Before everyone starts posting their Amazon affiliate links, look at the requirements that makes the LessWrong thread so valuable:

  2.  You must have read at least two other textbooks on 
      that same subject.
  3.  You must briefly name the other books you've read on
      the subject and explain why you think your chosen
      textbook is superior to them.

  Rules #2 and #3 are to protect against recommending a bad
  book that only seems impressive because it's the only
  book you've read on the subject.

I'm too sleepy to figure out how to comment tere. So you guys get this.

The best text on learning how to draw is a copy of Preston Blair's book(s) on drawing for animation. However that's only half the equation, because it lacks exercises. So you need to go to http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-le... and do what he tells you to. They will seem stupid at first. But trust John; a significant percentage of the talent in the Hollywood tv animation scene learnt their craft under his harsh tutelage.

Other textbooks on drawing I've read: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Figure Drawing for All It's Worth, The Vilppu Drawing Manual, The Animator's Workbook.

The combination of Preston Blair (long considered THE classic text on drawing for animation) and John K's exercises will VERY RAPIDLY teach you how to look at things,mbreak them down into simple shapes, and draw them convincingly. Other texts teach this but few start with the super-solid, super-simple cartoon art found in 1940s cartoons; you're immediately thrown into trying to break down a human body, or a car, or whatever, into shapes you don't understand yet. The simple characters wear their construction on their sleeves, so it's easy for you to understand it and learn.

I think we're hitting into a possible issue with these book recommendations.

Recommendations on learning/understanding something logically, and recommending a book based on how to learn how to do something can be very different.

I've read all of these art books (except Vilppu's), and I DON'T think the best text on how to learn how to draw is a copy of Preston Blair's books.

For me personally, I got the most advancement through Loomis' Figure Drawing For What It's Worth. I spent a lot time going over diagrams in the book. It transformed the way I approached drawing Other people, (especially people who get into art with no prior experience) swear by Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

In this case, a lot of what you think the best text would be depends on which way you prefer to draw. I like figure drawing mostly, so I learn towards Loomis and Hogarth. Someone who likes general life/possibly painting would prefer Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Someone who prefers animation, would definitely love Preston Blair's books (and possibly Fun with a Pencil).

I think not only a good book recommendation is useful, but a good useful explanation needs to go hand in hand with it.

Note the important caveat to my recommendation of the Blair: it is the best text on drawing IF YOU USE JOHN K'S EXERCISES. By itself it is a good book on cartooning; with the addition of John's exercises it becomes an awesome power tool for building skill.

(And honestly the real value here is John's exercises; you can get almost as much value out of them by freeze-framing great cartoons and drawing off of them. In fact I know for a while he was trying to package his course into a book, copiously illustrated with examples from the classic cartoons to work from, but ran into rights issues.)

Loomis is awesome too, I learnt a hell of a lot from him. I also learnt a lot from Bridgman's "Constructive Anatomy". But I feel the simple starting point of John's exercises for the Blair book really make it a great place to begin, and work up from.

(Of course I may be biased, as as I'm a cartoonist who's passed through Spümcø.)

Another author I would had with a very fun and get you very fast drawing : Loomis, especially "Fun with a pencil", that can be fun (as the Preston Blair book btw), free online. Both are very good books for beginners (and a good refresher for more advanced drawing).

I would stay away from Vilppu if I was a beginner — it's not that fun, and Drawing On the Right Side is very nice to "get" how to draw from reality. But I think those books (and the two others) should come way after !

Older book, like "The Practice and Science of Drawing" can be educating to read, but clearly not as first or second books, more to learn how drawing had been teached, and find things that show you more rigor (in an academic way).

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Nicolaides' "The Natural Way to Draw." While I never finished it, I liked it well enough and it's regarded as a classic. I'll have to check out Preston Blair's books.

I've always found a good way to pick text books and other reading material for a specific course is to find the university with the leading department for that subject, then find the syllabus for a class in that course taught there. My experience has been that it's rare to find a top university where you can't find syllabi (if not full course sites with powerpoints and assignments) online with some Google sleuthing.

Back in college, there were a few courses where my own professor's lectures were difficult to follow. I almost always was able to find additional material and often full PowerPoint decks from equivalent courses at other universities to help out.

"I've always found a good way to pick text books and other reading material for a specific course is to find the university with the leading department for that subject, then find the syllabus for a class in that course taught there."

This is a great way to find good texts. A wrinkle I add is to check the prerequisites for a course and repeat the process for each prerequisite till you have an ordered list of texts. Working through a text is much easier if you have nailed the pre requisites.

I used to do this too, ordering a big box of books from syllabus of prestigious universities at a level that was often way beyond me.

I usually flipped through them, and picked up a few things, but in the end I realized I had to really understand linear algebra, or number theory, or whatever, to really grok what was going on.

Now I knew I needed these prerequisites and why, not that someone just told me so. This motivated me a lot more to get through (or nail) the prerequisites.

And, depending on the field, one good way to get inexpensive reading material is to pick Latest.Edition - 1. For many courses, the incremental changes are small and the field doesn't advance fast enough to make the new book worth way more than the old book.

Subject: Linear Algebra Recommendation: Introduction to Linear Algebra by Gilbert Strang Reason: Strang presents the subject so clearly and intuitively that you feel like an expert on the subject after reading each chapter. It is by the far the best textbook I have encountered. He is also an excellent teacher and offers the lecture notes to the corresponding MIT class online.

Book: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Linear-Algebra-Fourth-Edi...

Lecture: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...

Strang's hand-wavy teaching style in my opinion kinda falls apart towards the later part of the course. I feel like the whole second half is kinda half baked. I didn't come away really having a good intuitive understanding of what the SVD was or why I should care about eigenvalues. I definitely think it's a good place to start though, but if you want something a little more organized I'd really recommend.

"Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra"

http://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Analysis-Applied-Algebra-Soluti...

It's very clearly written and all the proofs are not too long nor too short. It pretty quickly goes through all the stuff Strang covers and moves on to more difficult things.

Thank you for that recommendation; I had not heard about the book before.

An extra nice thing: the book's chapters are available for free --- for downloading and viewing, and not for other uses --- from the book's website: http://matrixanalysis.com

Strang is not adequate for someone looking for a rigorous presentation of linear algebra. Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right, and Halmos's (older) Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces are superior in rigor.

One of my professors once related a quote from an author of one of the course texts. The author declared that you should "make my book the third book you read on this subject", because the third book you read on a subject is always the one that enlightens you on it :-). There are many paths to understanding, and I hope that the third book is still as relevant without the preceding two already digested.

Perhaps relevant to some other HN users...

This list has a recommendation for Introduction to Tonal Theory over Piston's Harmony. I am not familiar with the former, but I found Walter Piston's books to be fascinating and generally very good. It's an older book and so, as I've found with most textbooks from its time, it is somewhat lacking in explanations of certain examples– but then, the internet will supply you with more than you need if you're already reading the material.

I also found Piston's book to be more than satisfactory. It's much better than the drivel that seems to have made its way into university theory classes everywhere. Alternatively, Hindemith's theory books take an interesting perspective, although they're definitely not for the beginner. Hindemith develops an interesting tonal system that, paradoxically, includes the atonal music of Schonberg as well as jazz, to his chagrin, and other more modern developments.

One of the nice parts of Piston's Harmony is that it makes for good bedside reading if you have a cursory knowledge of theory. You'll have many aha! moments for very little effort. Additionally, it's an excellent reference. I find myself consulting it from time to time.

From the Amazon reviews, it appears that the posthumous editions (4th and 5th) depart from the spirit of the earlier ones, and have become unpalatable.

Edit: One reviewer who has used the 3rd to 5th editions prefers the fourth one, which is less terse than the 3rd one.

Just checked my shelf– I have the third edition of Harmony and 4th of Counterpoint, terse is a fair judgement. I'll have to give the later editions a look, but judging by the reviews (and the Revised by MARK DEVOTO tag...) I'm not going to like what I see.

This is so much better than all the links to free Ebooks. Considering the time it takes to learn anything of substance, the constraining factor is rarely the price of a textbook, but time wasted on poor writing. Life is too short for bad textbooks.

There's a similar list at http://bestintrobook.com/all that includes most of the same, as well as introductory books for less academic topics.

The. Art. Of. Electronics.

I bought this as a sophomore in high school and was completely blown away by it. The chapter on PLLs alone is worth the price of the book.

I dunno. That book is really dense and terse. It's a good reference book, but not something you'd read cover to cover.

But you should read it cover to cover. You should buy a notebook; and some basic electronics equipment (and there's probably free simulation that's good enough online now) and work through it.

Draw the diagrams (freehand!), do the math (on paper, not with a calculator!), do the examples.

It's dense because it's complete (for the time, there's a lot of stuff that's missing for modern world) and it's terse because you're supposed to be doing the work at the same time.

And, if you really want to get in depth understanding you buy the AoE Lab-book and build stuff while you're reading the main text.

"That book is really dense [...]"

Yes, that's sort of the point. ;) Most textbooks that contain a lot of math and science-y stuff are that way. Also, you don't have to read a textbook cover to cover - I know I didn't in college.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It's how I learned electronics, so I can't knock it too much. However, sometimes the explanations, which tend to be intuitive rather than logical, can be quite hard to follow for someone who is more methodically-minded. So, for the nitty-gritty analog stuff in the bipolar transistor chapter of AoE, I much prefer "Design of Analog Integrated Circuits" by Gray and Meyer. It works for discrete circuits, too, even though integrated is in the name.

I don't think this is something that can be crowdsourced. The arguments here rest on authority (and in this case, it's well justified). You want the opinion of someone who has surveyed the field and has studied further than the respective textbooks take you. There may be some authorities whose replies are worth listening to, but these are difficult to distinguish.

For instance, a user recommending CLRS over TAOCP is an odd piece of advice, since TAOCP is distinctly not a textbook. The user purports to have read TAOCP, an assertion with a low prior-probability.

Unfortunately, I do not think we can rely on the advice of anonymous internet contributors. With no way to enforce the rules, LessWrong fails to do due diligence and is merely spreading the opinions of those that reply.

So, to remedy that, I would add a 4th rule: You must state where your authority on the subject, and on the choice of textbooks comes from.

I agree with your sentiment that recommending textbooks to a beginner is a very hard problem and crowd-sourcing may not be the best idea, but I do have questions for the example you provide to prove your assertion and some of the claims you make.

First of all, why would'nt you consider TAOCP a text book on algorithms? Are you trying to discredit discredit the recommender by supplying your own biases? If TAOCP is not a textbook and CLRS is and you provide no arguments against CLRS, why would you come to the conclusion that the contribution is poor? "LessWrong" has it's faults but the disclaimers that it provides is pretty clear and wouldn't you consider it worse if it interjected with it's own opinions?

If we need to listen to an authority "who has surveyed the field", would Knuth be such an authority and his recommendations contained in TAOCP be something you would recommend?

I haven't read TAOCP; in what sense is it not a textbook? If I wanted to buy a book to learn about algorithms, TAOCP is the first that would come to mind, so saying "you should buy this book instead of TAOCP" is potentially useful advice even if TAOCP is not technically a textbook.

Are any of the criticisms of TAOCP wrong? ("Knuth's TAOCP is wonderful but: very, very long; now rather outdated in the range of algorithms it covers; describes algorithms with wordy descriptions, flowcharts, and assembly language for a computer of Knuth's own invention. When you need Knuth, you really need Knuth, but mostly you don't.")

"Has read TAOCP" has low prior, but after reading this I have >50% confidence that the poster has read enough TAOCP to meaningfully compare it.

It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than the alternative (choosing randomly or based on Amazon review scores).

While slightly off-topic, do read more of lesswrong.com if you are new to the site. I personally find the site to be a solid repository of useful/thoughtful content.

Have you found a good heuristic for determining whether you are really learning something useful or just randomly browsing lesswrong? Not having that is my reason for avoiding it after quitea few hours spent on the site.

Some parts of Less Wrong are more concrete and less esoteric than others.

I quite like the Quantum Physics sequence. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences#The_Quantum_Physics...

It might be unrelated, but I followed the link to the critique of Bertrand Russell's history of Western Philosophy. The author claims its inaccurate, and proceeds to say anything about it but why its inaccurate. For instance, it says that the book ignores the role of Eastern Philosophy, well dah, the book is on Western philosophy. Russell is an admirer of Eastern Philosophy and has bee arguing that more of it needs to be consumed in the west (For more info, check Bertrand's The Problem of China). Then there is the claim that russell's logic lead him to believe that Rousseau led to Nazism, again no evidence of that whatsoever.

The piece was extremely unfounded, writing off at the beginning of the article because of that critique was a bad idea.

Isn't this what Amazon reviews are for? Because I seriously doubt this less wrong list is going to dive deep, to, say, graduate level hematopathology or modern factor analysis. But reviews of such items are readily available on Amazon.

Would be interesting to get some additional textbook recommendations from HN. I'll start with mine:

Subject: Startups

Recommendation: The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank

Reason: It's a highly practical guide/blueprint on taking new startups to market.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/... & first three chapters: http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upl...

He has just released a new book that should be the evolution of the one you cited. It should be called 'the startup's owner manual' and he said it contains what he has learned in the past ten years. you can find it on amazonn and on his site

Please also take into consideration the importance of peer discussion and debate. Just reading the books without an intense follow up discussion and debate makes it less likely that you can apply this new found knowledge. So maybe we can create a peer discussion Hangout API to go with these recommendations such that people can attend a common platform and coordinate small (3-5) discussion groups for elaboration and discussion.

This reminds me of this part from 'The Count of Monte Cristo' when Dantes met abbe Faria for the first time:

"I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times, I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know. I devoted three years of my life to reading and studying these one hundred and fifty volumes, till I knew them nearly by heart; so that since I have been in prison, a very slight effort of memory has enabled me to recall their contents as readily as though the pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name only the most important." -- Abbe Faria, Chapter 16. A Learned Italian.

Romantic quote, but it comes down to 1 book/week which seems quite unrealistic for 150 modern scientific textbooks. I challenge anyone to go through "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" in a week!

While that volume belongs on the 150 books for the well-read hacker, I wouldn't put it on the list for the well-read gentleman. We live in such a world of specialization, appreciation of true general education has suffered. In the age of Romance the 150 books would have been largely classical and philosophy. I think you could put together an awe-inspiring list of 150 that everyone with a bachelor's should be familiar with. Then we would actually live in an intellectually inspired society.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

-Robert A. Heinlein

This is an interesting start. I would say that the next (and possibly easier) step is compiling the reference books associated with these subjects, the original sources and their best versions (such as comparing translations and editions). I think starting to add these in other companion lists could also prevent people from suggesting original sources and reference books in lieu of textbooks. One good thing about a list of textbooks is that it shows just where market opportunities exists for potential authors, and also where the bar is already set high. I have observed perfectly authoritative books being "replaced" for no good reason. This may be encouraged by publishing companies due to the way copyright works. However, changing textbooks every few decades does not help the process of imparting understanding. Something like this list might help prevent that.

One thing to watch out for is that sometimes the third book you read is a your favorite, because you have a background familiarity created from the first two. For that reason, it can be not less wrong to reject recs from single book readers.

Digital communications by Bernard Sklar. A close second is Wayne Tomasi's book. Both books provide great intuition into the matter with just about the right detail.

Once you have both of those down (and have the requisite linear algebra / probability background), read the texts by Proakis and Gallager. They are very math heavy, (but also very precise and thorough) and though often recommended by university professors, definitely not a good introduction to the subject.

recommendation on the basis of grad-level studies and research on communication / signal processing.

I second this recommendation. Proakis was my undergraduate text. I read both Gallager and Sklar at grad school and would highly recommend the later over the other two.

not read enough other books on the subject to comment "fairly", but morrison and boyd's "organic chemistry" is one of the best texts i've seen on any subject. they take a traditionally daunting and information-dense subject and work out a clear, logical path through it that builds the material up step by step, explaining the principles behind each step and frequently referring back to foundational material. if you're struggling with organic chemistry in college, i'd strongly recommend getting a copy of this book.

I quite liked Janice G. Smith's text. OChem is definitely one of the more esoteric courses out there, but she synthesized everything in an incredibly logical, sensible progression.

Organic chemistry is like a spatial algebra. It's so weird, but it makes a lot of sense when you really begin to grok it.

There used to be a website called CanonicalTomes that allowed people to suggest and vote on the best books on various topics. It's been defunct for a long time, but you can still browse (though not search) it through the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010616232238/http://www.canonic...

Why aren't the textbooks used in public education free?

Why aren't there any good recommendations for High School Algebra and Algebra II, since the CAL college system requires both?

Heads up: The philosopher Frederick Copleston's name is misspelled on the entry under philosophy texts. I didn't spot an email address for the project.

Could anyone make a solid recommendation on a calculus book? Im currently using Calculus a Complete Course by Robert Adams and Chris Essex.

It depends on what you want; I came at calculus mostly from a civil and mechanical engineering point of view, and I found the Dover reprint of Morris Kline's Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach, originally published in 1968, very helpful.

Classical Mechanics, John R. Taylor

Its pretty much the best textbook I've ever owned.

Am I the only one who prefers blog posts, examples and wikipedia to textbooks? For anything IT related, anyway.

Textbooks are cripplingly sparse. They yak and yak and yak for a few pages on a concept you're figured out from the first sentence.

I would like a zoomable textbook. One which presents you a list of tl;dr explanations about every topic covered (one-two pages per book), but you may click on any topic and get a thorough description of it, and then I can click on any claim in that and get more specialized information and so on down to turtles.

I would like articles that way too.

You may want to check out my html5 textbook platform experiment.

http://www.bookvoid.com

It is designed around this "zoomable" principle.

Coincidentally, the "zoomable" aspect was inspired by some of Elizer Yudkowsky's posts who I believe is a founder of LessWrong.

I wish the wikipedia leads were more concise. A two sentence description of the concept in the most basic understandable language possible.

Then the next paragraph can be a more accurate lead.

The the content list; then the contents.

Your zoomable book idea is a good one. I'd prefer authority with good cites over crowd-sourced with semi-random citing.

I recommend checking out the "Simple English" wikipedia for more complex topics. It breaks those sentences down even more and is fantastic for math articles and the like.

There is no such thing as "the best textbooks", just "best textbooks" for each person.

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

While everyone has different tastes and needs, there's no doubt that some books are better than others. Not to belittle Gladwell too much - I enjoyed the talk and it's a valuable perspective on market segmentation - but using a pop science author talking about spaghetti sauce as a source is hardly an argument to dismiss the notion of quality.

Quality is important, but still subjective. Not to say this won't be a great curated list.

Anyways, I should have known better than to just throw that out there. My bad.

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