Back in 2011, lukeprog posted a textbook recommendation thread. It's a nice thread, but not every topic has a textbook recommendation. What are some other heuristics for selecting textbooks besides looking in that thread?
Amazon star rating is the obvious heuristic, but it occurred to me that Amazon sales rank might actually be more valuable: It's an indicator that profs are selecting the textbook for their classes. And it's an indicator that the textbook has achieved mindshare, meaning you're more likely to learn the same terminology that others use. (But there are also disadvantages of having the same set of mental models that everyone else is using.) BTW, my dad claims Goodreads star ratings can have a more informative spread than Amazon ones.
Somewhere I read that Elements of Statistical Learning was becoming the standard machine learning text partially because it's available for free online. That creates a wrinkle in the sales rank heuristic, because people are less likely to buy a book if they can get it online for free. (Though Elements of Statistical Learning appears to be a #1 bestseller on Amazon, in bioinformatics.)
Another heuristic is to read the biographies of the textbook authors and figure out who has the most credible claim to expertise, or who seems to be the most rigorous thinker (e.g. How Brands Grow is much more data-driven than a typical marketing book). Or try to figure out what text the most expert professors are choosing for their classes. (Oftentimes you can find the syllabi of their classes online. I guess the naive path would probably look something like: go to US News to see what the top ranked universities are for the subject you're interested in. Look at the university's course catalog until you find the course that covers the topic you want to learn. Do site:youruniversity.edu course_id on Google in order to find the syllabus for the most recent time that course was taught.)
Interesting topic, thanks for bringing it up.
Regarding sales rank vs. ratings, I disagree, but I don't feel strongly about my disagreement at all.
My impression is that different textbooks use roughly the same terminology, although I don't have much experience reading different textbooks on the same topic, so I don't feel too strongly about this impression.
Professors may be paid off (or some variation of "paid off") to require certain textbooks. I don't know much about this, just noting it as a possibility.
I suspect that professors aren't great at choosing textbooks that explain things well, in part due to the illusion of transparency, and in part due to my experience being one where professors aren't good at pedagogy. Or maybe they just don't care. Or perhaps they do care, but they care more about choosing a book that fits the curriculum they want to teach. I suspect that ratings do a better job of predicting how well the book explains things.
Some other things to consider:
I have a theory that the more good visuals a textbook has, the more likely it is to be a good textbook overall. If you can access some random pages in the textbook, try skimming through to get a sense of what quality of visuals there are in the textbook.
Try different books out before committing to one! Eg. by reading a small subsection or two. Seems like a reasonable investment of your time.
Read descriptions and reviews to see if you fit the target market. Ex. Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by ET Jaynes seems like a "good" book, but it probably isn't a good book if you're a beginner looking for an introduction (I'm guessing).