HN Books @HNBooksMonth

While I did take courses in probability, linear algebra, and lots of calculus, until recently, I forgot most of the probability and all of the linear algebra I learned in school. As for calculus, I only remembered how to take basic derivatives. In any case, I've been spending the past month brushing up on my linear algebra and probability, and it's been a struggle, but now that I'm motivated and under no time pressure to relearn the material, I find it way more fascinating than I did in college. In fact, I skipped tons of my linear algebra classes because I thought the subject was dry and dull. I also rushed through my probability and stats homework just so I could get a good grade on them. I think if you're motivated, and you can do basic math, you should be able to educate yourself in calculus, probability, and linear algebra. It'll be a struggle, but with motivation, you'll be able to pick up the concepts.

for probability and stats: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability-2nd-Dimitri-...

for linear algebra: https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Matrix-Algebra-Applications-Co...

this was my college calculus textbook: https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-7th-James-Stewart/dp/0538497.... I can't comment if it was good or not because by college, I had taken calculus twice so it was all a refresher

best of luck! You sound educated enough (yes, I'm judging from the couple sentences you wrote) that I think you won't have any problems acquiring math knowledge with persistence.

Realistically, it's money they'll use to buy the Stewart's Calculus ($200) [1] (which, let's be clear, is covering 350 year old subject matter). And then they'll use their financial aid to buy beer.

All of these intro texts (at $150-$200) are broken. They do not go into the subject matter deep enough to use as reference later in coursework or a career and their too expensive to disseminate knowledge widely. Realistically at $30 it's still too expensive to compete with free. But until annotation and referencing UX catches up for e-books dead-tree books still win for learning (I know people manage with PDFs and annotation, but I haven't had success with e-books for anything except for recreational reading). And I think there is a hurdle that is difficult to get over with getting other universities to adopt a university press book from a different university especially for an introductory text.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/0538497815/

⬐ ben1040

I was really happy that a calculus professor of mine told everyone that they could buy an older edition of this book if they wanted, and he would supply his own homework problem sets as handouts rather than depend upon the ones in the book. For the reading assignments, his syllabus listed page numbers for the past three editions, so everyone could keep up.

For $25 I was able to buy a copy two editions prior, which was what pretty much everyone else in the class was using too.

Of course this doesn't help actually solve the problem, since someone else had bought that book for $200 and they then saw it depreciate by $175 when they sold it to me used.

⬐ erichurkman

Even worse is when the intro classes mandate the book, only for the professor to not use it because the book is so weak and useless. $150 paperweight that can't be resold to the used book store because they come out with a new edition every year.