<p>What standard books are most commonly used in freshman year for physics, math, electrical, biomedical, and mechanical engineering?
Thank you :)</p>
<p>Stewart’s Calculus is pretty common, one of the many editions available.
For physics, I always liked one edition or other of: [Fundamentals</a> of Physics (8th Edition): Resnick and Walker Halliday: 9788126514427: Amazon.com: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Physics-Resnick-Walker-Halliday/dp/B002DIBJ66]Fundamentals”>http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Physics-Resnick-Walker-Halliday/dp/B002DIBJ66)
For engineering, your question is too vague.</p>
<p>Blitzer is also very popular for college-level maths. (I’ve had a class with one of his and two with Stewart’s.)</p>
<p>Amazon can probably sort ENGR books by popularity, which would give you some clue there. It would also stand to reason that books with a lot of used copies available would enjoy greater circulation due to popularity. </p>
<p>Is this just kind of out of general curiosity?</p>
<p>Thank you! PoppinBottlesMGT, I was hoping to have a general list of what to buy, because it will be far less expensive to buy books from where I come from. Plus, I was curious to know what most people use.</p>
<p>Engineering: well, I meant what introductory texts are used. I don’t really know specific topics in each field(signal processing? circuit electronics?), so I was hoping someone could also introduce those terms with the standard books.</p>
<p>I’ve already completed Resnick and Halliday as well as University Physics: is there more advanced reading in physics?</p>
<p>There is no such thing as an introductory text for engineering. That is the problem. There are literally thousands of separate subjects that go into all the engineering concentrations, so listing all the most popular books would be impossible. Further, each school introduces its students to engineering differently. I know when I was getting my BS, most of those introductory classes didn’t even have textbooks, but had note packets put together by the school.</p>
<p>My suggestion if you really want to know what books you’ll need is to go to the website for your school’s bookstore and it should have a means to look up the textbooks being used by each course. Just use that as a guide.</p>
<p>Don’t buy textbooks until you know exactly which ones will be used at your school for the specific courses that you will be taking. Otherwise you will have a nice reference book for your shelves and still have to purchase books locally. For example, DS#1 had to purchase an electronic key to access an on-line book and reference library for Chemistry. There are many Chemistry textbooks out there but they would have been of no use in his specific course. The course required that he complete some tasks directly in the on-line account. Note: the course itself had standard lecture and laboratory but the textbook was a digital compendium of information only accessible through the electronic key.</p>
<p>Sometimes homework is assigned from the book. My graphics and design book was like $250 so I just found a PDF. I bought a different book for a chem class once, and mostly used a different book for calc any times I had to look up a concept, but I wouldn’t plan on doing that as a default. I rarely need a book for anything other than homework where I need the assigned text, so I think you would be better served to just plan on not getting it until you need it, and then maybe finding a PDF if the price is an issue.</p>