<p>I am going into my 3rd semester of Engineering and I still have not figured out why these textbooks are written in such a poor way.</p>
<p>I am taking Calculus II and we use Varberg, Dale and Purcell. My grades have ranged from 100 to 30 on one of my last quizzes. I still have a B in the class, so I decided to ditch this stupid, senseless textbook and try a new approach.</p>
<p>I had a quiz last week on Series, one of the most dreaded topics in Calculus II, so I decided to just go over the 2 chapters on "Calculus II for Dummies" that deal with series, did not do any exercises in the book, did not waste my time reading any stupid, long example with proofs that I cant even understand.</p>
<p>I got an 85 on my last quiz after spending only a couple hours reading the two chapters that deal with Series in the Dummies book.</p>
<p>We have one more quiz until the end of the semester and honestly, I don't even understand why I wasted almost 200 bucks on this stupid textbook.</p>
<p>Yeah, the majority are horrendous and too wordy. But, NEVER pay $200 for a book. Get online and find the international version from abe books or something. For my OR class, the only reason I ever use the book is for HW. His class notes are good enough for the rest.</p>
<p>Agree with Chucktown. Never pay full price for a textbook unless you plan to keep it as a reference book, and even then you probably will never open it once your class is finished.</p>
<p>Lake Jr. reads the reviews on Amazon very carefully before buying a required text. If too many reviewers trash the textbook, he buys the cheapest most “acceptable” used copy and uses the savings to buy a more well respected book on the specific subject to use as a supplement, if he thinks he needs one in addition to the professor’s classnotes. I’d also suggest lookikng at what’s available in the school library to supplement your required text.</p>
<p>yea man, textbooks are crap. and 200 dollars is alot. You can save so much by just renting them. Its what i started doing this semester and i save so much. And you dont have to be stuck with it either if you dont like it.</p>
<p>I’ve apparently had a very different textbook experience than most of you. Most of mine were reasonably good references, especially in the later classes.</p>
<p>It may be that the author’s writing and explanation style just don’t mesh well with you, in which case maybe you just need a supplemental source that approaches things from a slightly different angle.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My experience is similar. The textbooks for the junior/senior courses were pretty good. The ones that suck:</p>
<ul>
<li>Calculus Sequence (Edwards & Penney)</li>
<li>Linear Algebra</li>
<li>Differential Equations</li>
<li>Physics Sequence
…needed Schaums outlines on all of them</li>
</ul>
<p>After that…pretty decent books for:</p>
<ul>
<li>Combinatorics</li>
<li>Graph Theory</li>
<li>Optimization/Linear Programming</li>
<li>Modern Physics</li>
</ul>
<p>I had the “still champ” of C-programming books…Kernighan & Ritchie and had the Andrew S. Tanenbaum books for Operating Systems and Computer Networks.</p>
<p>I don’t remember any of the books I had for my first calculus and physics classes. I sold them all anyway. Most of those books seem (to me at least) to be written in a style specifically tailored to teaching early undergraduate courses and are not often great reference texts on the topic, whereas the later books that get more specialized are more often written as more comprehensive reference texts and remain useful for far longer.</p>