<p>Hi guys,</p>
<p>I'll be living financially independent this summer on campus, and I am trying to figure out a way to eat on my $10.25 wage. As you can imagine, I am trying to save every bit I can to make it this summer. I have textbooks this year I am not sure if I will ever use again and two of them were particularly expensive (over $200 per book). These are economics textbooks, and I will most likely be an economics major. One is a Principles book (Case & Fair) and the other is a statistics book (Anderson). Do I need to keep these texts for reference? If I keep pursuing the major, I'll be buying separate macroeconomics, microeconomics, and econometrics books later, so I doubt I'll need to keep these books for reference. Have any of you benefited from keeping your intro major books? Also, is it worth it to keep my elementary calculus text (calculus 1 and calculus 2)?</p>
<p>I’ve never met anyone who kept their intro books, mostly because they say information found in them is usually simple enough to just search somewhere else if actually needed. Of the few people I know who have graduated and kept ANY books, those books were from upper-level courses that they enjoyed. No idea how often they look back at them.</p>
<p>For the calc books – if you end up in vector calculus, I’d keep them for reference. At very least, that’s when I found them useful.</p>
<p>Can you get a decent price for them?</p>
<p>I keep almost all my books (and am glad that I do), but in your position I would simply plan to use the library (which will have <em>some</em> intro-level books even if not those particular ones) if I needed to review intro-level discussions in the near future and if later on I realized I wanted or needed intro-level texts on my shelf I would buy something relatively inexpensive from Amazon.</p>
<p>Even if the books you have already bought are the absolute best possible introductions to the subjects, I think it’s a lot easier to review ideas I’ve already learned from inferior books than it is to learn them from inferior books in the first place.</p>
<p>For Calc I/II/III/LinAlg/DiffEq, the following site is invaluable both as a supplement to whatever text you have and as a replacement if you choose to sell it:</p>
<p>[Pauls</a> Online Math Notes](<a href=“http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/]Pauls”>http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/)</p>
<p>I used it to get through quite a bit. I’m not studying much math any more, but I do keep my copy of “Advanced Calculus” on the shelf to impress the ladies… :P</p>
<p>Thanks, guys. I’ll be taking multivariable calculus and linear algebra next year. The link to the math notes is incredible – I surely appreciate it! I’ll see what kind of prices I can grab for the books. As I said before, I paid around $200 per book, so I’d like to a decent return. I kept them in basically perfect condition. We’ll see. </p>
<p>On a slightly related note, sirsteveh, do you recommend linear algebra before multivariable calculus?</p>
<p>I’ve never purchased a textbook. I rent them. But I suppose for certain classes, I would start.</p>
<ul>
<li>I take that back. I bought and kept an algebra book. It comes in handy!</li>
</ul>
<p>I have not needed any of my intro textbooks after the class, although i keep most of them.</p>
<p>You can sell your textbooks and then use free online textbooks (or torrented textbooks) as reference. :p</p>
<p>@Sligh_Anarchist: I took them concurrently (for reference: [Math</a> 324 and Math 308](<a href=“http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/math.html]Math”>MATHEMATICS)). There’s no dependency between them, at least at first (there’s a little bit by the second quarter, but I didn’t go that far).</p>
<p>^^ LOL I thought I was seeing things, but sirsteveh, I took those EXACT same two courses some while ago. Did you take them at the UW??</p>
<p>Yup. Before I transferred I took 307, 308, 324, 327, and 480. Then I realized math was getting less and less fun and I stopped studying math after I transferred.</p>