= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lukeprog comments on The Best Textbooks on Every Subject - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (319)
In college, I found most of the time that the professor's lecture notes contain almost everything of value that both the textbook and the lecture contains, but they contain ten times less text. This led me to believe that textbooks are a terribly inefficient way to convey facts, by comparison to the format of lecture notes. Books are words, words, words, flowery metaphors, digressions, etc. Hell, I don't know what they spend all those words on. But I know that, potentially, lecture notes are one fact after another.
I find all those extra words surrounding the bare facts in textbooks to be highly useful. That's what helps me not just memorize the teacher's password but really understand the material at a gut level.
They get ME bored. Every book is six hundred to a thousand pages, and when you're done with it, you've got a hundred pages worth of knowledge. I think it's better to memorize some passwords, then separately look up specific ideas that didn't make sense.
Fair enough. :)
I love reading a good textbook. Good nonfiction is so much more exciting for me than good fiction. And of course, I learn far more from good nonfiction.