Thanks to the lovely sites in the sticky, I've amassed quite a few academic textbooks I'd like to read for the sake of learning. It's daunting, though, to have 500-1600 pages to pull through. Is it realistic to try to read a textbook for fun or does it just take so fucking long you're likely to give up?
Anyone else read textbooks for fun? What's your take?
no one non-fiction here
/lit/ is only plebs and fags
I find that I like the idea of reading and studying textbooks (or any rigorous didactic nonfiction) more than the reality of actually doing it.
>>7811886
reading textbooks doesn't make you cool or smart. Textbooks are for passing a course, not getting to the truth of anything
you're just a pretentious faggot
I was a high school dropout, so I taught myself up to university level math and science using textbooks I either found or pirated. Why is it difficult?
Just do 30 minutes a day or something. Humanities "textbooks" (basic surveys and stuff) are fun too, but I'm actually in the humanities so maybe I'm biased. It's sort of like light reading because you aren't supposed to be GRAPPLING WITH PRIMARY SOURCES and stuff. You are being spoonfed a little bit because it's for undergrads and supposed to cement very basic overview knowledge. You can just chill and rest assured you won't miss anything by blinking or having your mind wander and think about boobs for one second.
Try using OCW stuff. Most people don't fully appreciate that they include syllabi as well as lectures. MIT has amazing science junk and probably the best OCW, obviously, but Yale has great Humanities OCW as well, Berkeley has some badly organised stuff out there and lots of stuff up on Archive.org. Some of the Humanities ones are a bit harder because the concepts aren't neatly atomised, and you get an hour of Paul Fry rambling about the New Critics rather than some dude methodically elaborating an actual physics problem. But still good.
My favourite textbooks were biology ones where it was very conceptual and I didn't have to feel dumb for sucking at math. I ragequit calculus.
>>7811471
It's up to you. I've read ten textbooks the past few years. Six psychology, two chemistry, and two math. I start college this summer and I don't regret all that time.
>>7811905
Because philosophy ever got anyone to the truth of anything. No, you're right. Steer clear of those useless textbooks. Dipshit.
>>7811923
enjoy your textbooks, everyone will think you're very smart. Please indulge me, which ones did you have your eye on anyways?
>>7811912
ok can you solve these for me?
1. r = 6 (put it back in rectangular)
2. Convert these to decimal
(-1,-pi/4)
(1,pi/2)
3. Eliminate the parameter of
x = t^5, y = ln(t)
This is basic university level calc 2
>>7811938
>Everyone on 4chan must be the same guy
>People who read textbooks do it because they care what you think
>>7811471
i love textbooks, anyone who disses at them over here is an idiot, check out gardener art through the ages its very neat and highly informative, not to mention its easy pace.
>>7811959
Anon said they ragequit calculus. Why would they know how to solve that?
>>7811471
I really enjoyed Klein organic chemistry
>>7811901
I also just say I do.
>>7811905
I hope you're a troll, else you sound curshingly insecure.
>>7811959
I'm a math major, these are badly phrased questions with the clear intention of tripping the autodictat up.
Reminds me of the kind of shit we used to have in Indian exams (not the competitive ones) where the focus was on learning the technical definitions of sums as opposed to applying your flare.
Here's a better question, a function f(x) is such that f(x)=1/(x2-x1) where x1<x<x2
prove that the definite integral of xf(x) from x1 to x2 is = (x1+x2)/2
Basically, derive the formula for expected value of a uniform distributuion.
Will post some putnam and ARML problems consider yourself decent at math if you solve any one of them.
read textbooks for the information that you specifically want to know. As in, don't be daunted by them, just skip around if you get bored. What's the use if you have to drag your feet through mud just to get to the interesting parts?
Textbooks are made to cover vast amounts of information on a subject. You can read part of them without having read every sentence that leads up to that part, and therefore a textbook can act as a sort of wikipedia article, where you only care to know about one subheading or two and go straight to it after reading the intro. Easy.
