<p>School starting up soon. Should I be looking into books for my classes now, or do I not have to worry about it until we have our first class?</p>
<p>Dont worry about it yet. When you get to school, head to the bookstore. They have every book organized by the class its required for and its very easy to find them. Id suggest going in and picking them up on move-in day if you have time. If not, you can just pick them up during the first week of class.</p>
<p>It’s important to figure out if you’re really going to need your book. A lot of classes don’t use the book at all (even if it says it’s ‘required’) and other classes use the book so rarely that you can just borrow a friend’s.</p>
<p>Also, I recommend that you look online for buying books. The bookstore prices tend to be much higher, especially if there’s an international edition of your book.</p>
<p>You can save a ton of money by buying books online. Do that when at all possible, which means you should start looking as soon as you know your classes.</p>
<p>Bigwords has always been my favorite online place.</p>
<p>Some classes (looking @ you ENGE 1104) may have a book posted that you won’t actually need to buy since they aren’t used. Day one we get to class and we’re told it was a mistake and that the book shouldn’t have been listed. Needless to say, the bookstore bought it for more than I paid on bigwords.</p>
<p>You’ll have to buy lab manuals and VT class-specific books at the bookstore, but that’s all I’d recommend unless something is urgent.</p>
<p>^ You raise an interesting topic.</p>
<p>I’d love to hear where everyone usually gets their texts from. Amazon, buy.com, half.com, bigwords, etc. (and further thoughts on them if you have any; ie. such and such is usually cheaper blah blah). As well, any distinction between where you get your texts vs. solution manuals, or all same place?</p>
<p>^ Bump for the above inquiry. So, where specifically does everyone usually buy his texts from?</p>
<p>Bigwords isn’t actually an online retailers, it simply aggregates the prices from a wide variety of websites.</p>
<p>I rented a bunch of mine from the library and just kept renewing them. Sometimes the library would have to order it so I’d have to wait a week or two but it saved me a ton of money. More applicable for upper level classes than lower though.</p>
<p>Seeing as how Bigwords aggregates, that’s always been good enough for me. Being paranoid I check other places too just to be sure, but I can’t think of any times I beat BW.</p>
<p>And I don’t work for them :-p promise.</p>
<p>Different people will say different things about book rental sites, but I’m not necessarily sold (pun intended) on the idea. Some books are nice to have around while others you won’t ever open again.</p>