For physics, I suggest Physics for Scientists and Engineers: A Strategic Approach with Modern Physics by Randy Knight.
Shankar is good introductory text on quantum mechanics at the graduate level.
If you have a good background, you should definitely read The Feynman Lectures on Physics. This one is not for beginners. You have been warned.
Thank you! Ironically I am substantially less interested in physics than chemistry and biology, but I'll look into the books you mentioned.
I'm a graduate student in mathematics, but I haven't taken physics since high school. This makes me nervous about approaching most physics textbooks since I want real basics in some ways but sophistication in others.
Apologies for being a bit OT, but new account so I can't post this question directly (if that's even the proper approach) - and they're semi-relevant to this question.
I'm trying to remember the location of some maths teaching videos, or enough about them to find them again. They were made by a member of the LW community, though hosted on his own page, and mentioned in a post about self-improvement or similar. I think I mentioned them on here before - they seemed like great videos individually, though sadly lacking signposts from one to the next as a collection. Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
A while back, Lukeprog set up an article to list the best textbooks in every subject. It currently contains a fairly large list of books in a variety of subjects.
I just got an e-mail from Amazon advertising "Up to 90% off textbooks" and I thought "This seems like a good opportunity to check out a bunch of cheap, good textbooks in subjects I want to learn about!"
When I went over to Luke's post, I discovered recommendations for philosophy, psychology, all sorts of math, but almost none in basic science.
I assume that someone here must have read one or a few basic textbooks on physics, biology, and chemistry. If so, what were they? How were they? Would I be better off just trying to take a basic lecture course in the subject, or going through Khan Academy?