Textbook Recommendation Thread.

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For those of us who prefer to learn on our own from textbooks, this is a thread for the asking advice about textbooks, making suggestions about them, or otherwise discussing self-contained learning material.


First question:


Which textbook would be best for studying the Latvian language and in what way is it the best?

I can't help you with Latvian worth a damn.

However, here is a v v good undergraduate calculus text:

http://www.lightandmatter.com/calc/calc.pdf

And here is something on Common Lisp I found I liked more than the Practical Common Lisp site

http://www.psg.com/~dlamkins/sl/contents.html

YMMV

Yes. When I write my own open text(s), they will be in very straightforward language. I had this calculus book that was translated (apparently directly) from German and it was a nightmare to read it. Even then, a good deal of authors who have English for their native language like to write as densely as they possibly can. I want my teaching material to be very, very lucid.

Yes, Lisp is a programming language, and a very good one at that.

I can't help you with your Latvian dilemma, however I do have a textbook to recommend.

The Chemical Engineer's Bible:
Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes.

This book's used from freshman intro courses to senior Plant Design and beyond. Contains everything from the basic Ideal Gas Law to calculating the recycle stream flow rate out of a condenser on a separation column to calculating the TNT stick equivalent of an exploding canister of Xenon.

Why did I pick such a boring field?

Don't you want to do cool stuff though?

It's your choice of course; I feel that you can probably do so much more than bag groceries or whatever. If you enter history or language or something in a professional capacity you'll have more opportunities, too.

My educational path, assuming I stay in America, shall depend on the contemptible FAFSA.
I should also retake the ACT, as I now know more than I did in 2004 and I'm back on Dexedrine too, so I should now be able to get much more than a lousy 22 on the ACT.

The thing about college is that it encourages people to go into debt, and I HATE the idea of owing an institution that treats a person with a smile as they apply, a smile that is due to the influx of money.

History and linguistics are some of my current interest, but what I've applied and been accepted for is Chemistry, which was my favorite subject for high school. The languages of Latin and Latvian are just my current fixations, which will probably pass for a time and then I'll study them again. History has always been a favorite topic of mine, but with all the internet archives, who needs a historian anymore? History is a great study for one's own benefit, but I don't see a career in it as possible to attain anymore. Even if I did get a PhD in History, taking 8 to 10 years at $25,000 a year, just to end up getting paid... how much for certain?

It's a real shame iamnotaparakeet. You seem like you've got a lot of potential (certainly more than the slope-foreheaded half literate semi-morons I go to school with).

Here are the options I have been looking into most recently:



http://www.phc.edu/academics/liberalarts/BAHistory.asp

If I were to go to college, I'd want to go to a Christian one,
simply as a matter of freedom of speech for me.