It’s going to be a very busy day, in ways that will keep me away from the Internet for most of the day, so you’ll need to entertain yourselves. Here’s a question for the science-minded:
What’s your favorite science textbook of all time?
It could be your favorite book from when you were a student, or it could be your favorite book to teach out of, but if you’ve got a favorite textbook, leave the name in the comments. Obviously, my expertise in dealing with textbooks is mostly in physics, but I’ll throw this open to all sciences, so go ahead and nominate that biology book you can’t get enough of.
What’s my answer?
I haven’t done this as a dorky poll before now because I find it a really tough question. I don’t really recall ever liking any of my textbooks all that much, and I haven’t been hugely enthusiastic about any of the books I’ve taught from.
Probably the best book I’ve taught out of is Hecht’s Optics. It’s certainly the book I’ve stuck closest to in planning my lectures. The coverage is pretty comprehensive, and the explanations are both clear and detailed. It’s a little dry, but it’s the first place I turn if I need information about anything in optics.
On the student side… that’s a tough one. I got a good bit of use out of Baym’s quantum mechanics book, when I was studying for the Ph.D. qualifier (and as a bonus it was a cheap paperback edition), but it’s a little odd in some places. I never really took a class out of Horowitz and Hill’s The Art of Electronics, but it’s been extremely useful to me over the years. David Park’s quantum mechanics book is surprisingly readable, and the source of my very favorite elision (“A few minutes’ thought will show that…”), but I’m not sure I’d call it the best textbook ever.
Just to pick something, I’ll go with Bairlein’s book on classical mechanics. It was the text for a tutorial class I took as an undergrad, and to the extent that I know anything at all about Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, I learned it from reading that book.
So, what’s your favorite? Please don’t comment here about books that you hated– there’ll be a separate post for that.