Ask HN: What, in your opinion, are the greatest and most useful textbooks?
For self-education from books, textbooks are essential. They are literally designed to convey information on a subject to students. But there are a lot of textbooks. Which ones are the best?
Preliminary research has suggested Spivak is best for Calculus. SICP is another famous one I've heard of. What about Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Anatomy, History?
Any contributions to this list are much appreciated.
110 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadFor me, books for self-studying should have a slightly informal tone and ramble a little. The book is your teacher, and I'd like my teacher to speak to me as a student, not a theorem prover, as least when I'm starting. Spivak, Pugh and Axler are some good examples, while I could only grok Rudin after learning all the basic.
Not a lot of experience with physics but I like Symon's Classical Mechanics and Purcell for the same reason. Kleppner's mechanics book has very good exercises too.
Swokowski wrote phenomenal books, in math, just in general.
By "Axler", you surely mean the one with the catchy title, about linear algebra. I find it unbearable. The book says: "determinants are difficult and nonintuitive"; anybody who understands determinants: "man, it's the damn area and volume".
Flipping through the Smalltalk books was an eye-opener back in the day.
There's an amazing but little-known book in the same printing style as K&R about systems software from the MCC consortium, with tons of C source code.
It has informal and approachable style and even has a companion study book full of experiments. [1]
One of my favourites from my university days was also Introduction to Heat and Mass Transfer. [2]
Universe is a great introduction to Astronomy [3]
Wind Energy Handbook is also a comprehensive introduction to... well I think you can guess. [4]
[1] https://learningtheartofelectronics.com/
[2] https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780471457282/Fundamentals-Heat-M...
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/705558.Universe
[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97811199927...
It is indeed Incropera-Dewitt!
I was also reading an amazing set of papers on horizontal axis marine current turbines by Batten and Bahaj [1]. That was in 2009 so not sure what progress the field has made, but they kinda blew my mind at the time.
[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Hydrodynamics-of-marin...
K&R indeed and K&Pike's 'The Practice of Programming'.
Vince's 'Mathematics for computer graphics' (haven't read his calculus book but it's on the wishlist).
Petzold's 'Code'.
Leventhal's Z80 and MC68000 books back in the day.
History, short form: Orwell, "Animal Farm"
(One of these 20th century works is an extended treatment of a bunch of animal bad apples who lie, cheat, and steal to maintain power over their fellow animals. The other is fiction)
Completely with you about Spivak, as far as calculus goes.
Physics: recently picked up Walter Lewin's "For the Love of Physics" and it's a masterpiece. Didn't get the chance to finish it because of the pandemic and it got locked in the office but it appears he's managed to cram in an entire university course in one book.
Biology and anatomy - "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins is brilliant entry point for people with limited knowledge on the subject.
Chemistry - no idea, that's the one subject which I hated with a passion since I was a child. Very paradoxical, given that physics was arguably my favorite subject ¯\_(ツ)_/¯...
History - Yuval Noah Harari's books, though somewhat anecdotal as far as history is concerned. I'd say there are way too many to list here and there is way too much to read about all major events in history to fit in just a few books.
It has some good recipes in it, but the instruction it provides on baking and pastry making has really helped me improve my technique over the years.
He also has a huge multi-volume textbook on differential geometry per se but I never read it. Probably brilliant as well.
Will take you from undergrad to bits of grad school. Encompassing and clear.
It was a bit harder to find as good a bible for inorganic chemistry.
Softley' Atomic Spectra and Keeler's Why Chemical Reactions Happen are phenomenal primers too but are a bit smaller in scope than the aforementioned two.
The same Atkins from above also wrote Molecular Quantum Mechanics which is also a solid text
I think that's more because physical chemistry is quite hard
I feel it takes time to read, but it's the one book that provided the most value in my understanding of chemistry.
Siegel's free (and source available IIRC) textbook on quantum field and string theory (can't comment on treatment of the latter) is a nice, if completely impenetrable by virtue of being enormous, book.
I recommend "Advanced Tire Mechanics" to anyone looking for a proper, modern, book on the subject - Pacejka's writing is messy and dull.
Campbell's Biology
Synthetic biology: A Primer
An introduction to systems biology by Uri Alon (get the 2020 edition)
O'Reilly: Biobuilder
http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html
I concur that his textbook and sense of humor were fantastic. It was very enjoyable for me to learn the material from his lectures. They are a great supplement to the textbook (or maybe vice versa?) and you can find them here: https://youtu.be/BCiZc0n6COY
It covers three main topics: - Automata theory - Computability - Computational Complexity
What I especially liked about the book was how he approached proofs. When introducing a proof, there is first a short "proof idea" paragraph that emphasizes the main approach behind the proof informally. He then gives out the full, formal proof. For self-study, those proofs can sometimes be intimidating, and not strictly necessary depending on your goals, but understanding the ideas was important to understand the topic.
I remember there being a question where after implementing a tree where the leaf nodes are represented as a list, they then pose the question - how much of your code needs to change if you needed to reimplement them as a pair?
The point being a pithy lesson in indirection/abstraction - had the student set up named accessors, there would be very little code to change.
A fascinating multidisciplinary approach to explain what happens behind our most consequential behaviours.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31170723-behave
Intro to Statistical Learning by Hastie, Tibshirani, James and Witten: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Statistical-Learning-App...
Ron Chernov: Alexander Hamilton. An excellent introduction to the birth of US. As a european US history is not that well covered in our school. There's also the musical version by Lin Manuel Miranda which alone is worth a few books of education alone.
On the birth of modern india: Herman: Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age
On the roman world: Julius Caesar: Gallic wars. This is a surprisingly readable book given that it's a propaganda piece written two thousands years ago. Highly recommended as it gives insight to just how organized-yet-cruel the ancient world was.
General history:
Acemoglu: Why nations fail. This is a must read. It attempts to explain (with great success) how institutions have molded the modern states into the way they are now, and what exactly seems to be at the root of inequality and prosperity.
If I had to recommend two books, "Why nations fail" would always be one on that list.