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Growing up, I had a ton of information books on planets and dinosaurs and such. I really loved those. I also had this small travelers guide to Russian that I used to read allll the time. I never got very good at Russian though. Back when I was in high school, at the end of the year, the teacher said they were going to toss out all the old Latin textbooks and get new ones. So I asked if I could keep mine, and I think I ended up paying $5 for it. I don't use it very much, but it makes me happy I got to keep it. One day I'll go back to it, one day. I also have this lovely book on the Ainu language I got. It's fairly old. There's a lot of interesting information in there about not just the language, but also geolinguistic clues of the extent of the Ainu populations before the arrival of the Wajin and such. "Aomori" makes so much more sense now. I really like it a lot. I've got a cookbook on how to make cheese. And while I have yet to make a cheese turn out how I intended, it's a really nice book packed with information. I was surprised when the section about cheese mites was more about how to get them than how to get rid of them. o.O What non-fiction non-narrative (is that a term?) books do you have that you really enjoy?
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Apr 1, 2023 13:15
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I'm doing a Biblical Greek class and there are at least three people who write notes directly in their textbook, in pen, and they aren't going to see heaven.
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Apr 1, 2023 15:38
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I have purchased 5 or 6 intro to logic books this year. In the introduction, each logician says "I know there's so many existing books but no one teaches it the way that *I* want to teach it." I am so deeply grateful that each logician desires to teach it their own way because I have been able to read through a bunch of very interesting books by really smart people teaching the same concepts in slightly (or vastly) different ways. My hero is Dr. Peter Smith, whose Introduction to Formal Logic, really hit it home. As it turns out, informal logic confuses the poo poo out of me even when it's supposed to be very obvious (I'm looking at you, Wilfrid Hodges...) While informal logic is kinda slippery, formal logic makes sense. FWIW, IFL is available on Peter Smith's website, Logic Matters, for free!
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Apr 1, 2023 18:59
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I have a number of dictionaries and language textbooks that I treasure. I have a book of Argentinian slang (Lunfardo), a Catalan-English dictionary, a textbook of Hispanic linguistics, and a book about Inuit words, because I studied Inuktitut in university. Would love to get my hands on that Ainu language book, if you can share the title.
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Apr 2, 2023 04:42
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Having dictionaries in text form has been handy. My father has a ton, so I mostly refer to his. For my field (computer science), I love referring to the "dragon book" (Compiles: Principles, Techniques, and Tools) and go through it to refresh my memory from time to time. I also have the Norvig & Russell AI textbook, which seems a little bit quaint in today's age when statistical machine learning is dominant--I reread it for fun from time to time. Not sure if it counts as a "reference" per se, but I also have several volumes of the History of the American Cinema series (each covering a decade) and find those to be extremely comprehensive works on broad trends in film and filmmaking for the years they describe. They do convey historical "narratives," though.
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Apr 2, 2023 05:01
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If I could only keep one reference book, it would be this one. 3.25 x 5.5 inches but over 800 pages of reference tables for basically everything. Thread pitches, electronics, ASCII codes, knots, oil viscosities, unit conversions, wood finishes, it's all here. If I need to look something up and my Internet connection is down, this is usually what I reach for.
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Apr 2, 2023 06:45
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Meeting someone with a copy of The Animator's Survival Kit is like the animation equivalent of being a wrestling fan and meeting someone who is also wearing a wrestling tshirt. Even if someone never becomes a successful or talented animator it's worth it at least for that, but it's also just a pretty good reference book for all levels of experience on animation fundamentals that is useful if you're ever in a position where you ever have to draw anything in motion ever.
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Apr 3, 2023 00:26
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Redezga posted:Meeting someone with a copy of The Animator's Survival Kit is like the animation equivalent of being a wrestling fan and meeting someone who is also wearing a wrestling tshirt. Even if someone never becomes a successful or talented animator it's worth it at least for that, but it's also just a pretty good reference book for all levels of experience on animation fundamentals that is useful if you're ever in a position where you ever have to draw anything in motion ever. I love that book, but I doubt I will ever animate anything 
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Apr 3, 2023 03:51
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I have Garner’s Modern English Usage next to my desk. I love it because it gives a rating of how far along an “incorrect usage” is to becoming “correct”. I wish I could load this dictionary onto my kindle. 
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Apr 3, 2023 14:49
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My job for a while involved a lot of writing and the Economist magazine’s style guide is my preferred style guide. It’s sharp and thoughtful. The magazine itself has by far the crispest writing among any publications I read and the guide reflects a lot of that excellence. I used it in conjunction with Garner’s Modern English usage and the AP’s style guide, but I really appreciate that it’s a lot more internationalized than the other two.
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Apr 3, 2023 19:49
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Tippecanoe posted:I have a number of dictionaries and language textbooks that I treasure. I have a book of Argentinian slang (Lunfardo), a Catalan-English dictionary, a textbook of Hispanic linguistics, and a book about Inuit words, because I studied Inuktitut in university. Would love to get my hands on that Ainu language book, if you can share the title. Sorry, I wish I remembered. It's in a box in a closet in a basement on another continent, so I don't have it on hand right now. However, after some digging around, I think I found it! https://archive.org/details/ainuenglishjapan00batcuoft/page/16/mode/2up It was published around the year I remember the book was publish, and it has exactly the extremely imperialist writing style I remember; I'm pretty sure it's this one. Such excellent sentences as, "Had known I should stay so long in Sapporo, I would have brought my servant with me." The search bar is a bit weird, but if you go past the first set of ~500 pages, around page 24 he starts talking about place names. There's a restored version on Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/Ainu-English-Japanese-Dictionary-Including-Grammar-Language/dp/1332772838 but apparently the eBook version can't handle rendering the katakana characters used throughout. Also, I'm really loving some of the suggestions ITT, I might have to grab a few of these. I think most people sell their college textbooks back, but I decided to keep all mine. I never used any of them for anything again though pretty sure. Shadow0 fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 17:32
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Shadow0 posted:I think most people sell their college textbooks back, but I decided to keep all mine. I never used any of them for anything again though pretty sure. I still read mine from time to time... some, anyway. I do like going to the bargain sections of university bookstores because that's where some class books end up.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:02
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Most of my classes now have e-books that you "rent" aka pay full price for and only get for 6 - 12 months before you lose access. I gotta say, I like this system because I hate having textbooks around but I do wish that it lowered the prices a bit or that you got them indefinitely...
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Apr 5, 2023 23:17
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On the topic of ebooks. I've been taking Korean classes through the King Sejong Institute curriculum and they provide all their textbooks for free on this site along with all the audio samples and stuff, and they're also translated into seven languages. I had to withdrawn from this semester because I had some life stuff to take care of, but I'm so glad they put this stuff out there for free so I can at least keep practicing until the next semester. They just updated them this year as well so they've become even easier to self learn with, although having a native speaker to work with is still the most effective way I've found so far.
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Apr 6, 2023 11:07
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Dip Viscous posted:If I could only keep one reference book, it would be this one. I have at least two editions of this, it fuckin' rules. I have a shelf with a bunch of Haynes manuals, but not the real ones, the fake ones they put out. A few of them are Star Wars and Star Trek, but I also have the ones for Soyuz, Apollo 11, and the Tiger tank. I also got a few neat books from that subscription box VSauce does: A book about stars (with northern and southern constellations) a book on the periodic table where each element gets a two-page spread of photos of samples of the substances that element is in, and a book of things that a dude cut in half with a water jet. Also a bunch of books about fighter jets.
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Apr 6, 2023 13:15
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Somewhere I also have a big-rear end heavy book on east Asian art from an art history class in college. I held onto it even though the professor called it "a work of utter detritus" and only ever referenced it in class so we could look at the pretty pictures for things he didn't have slides of.
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Apr 6, 2023 13:23
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I don't own it, but I found this awesome book that was just a big compilation of a bunch of retro futurist ads from the 50s and 60s and stuff at an antiques mall. It looked great, but the glue for the cover had completely worn away and they wanted $40 for it
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Apr 6, 2023 13:54
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Multiple math professors in university gave me detailed instructions on how to pirate textbooks lol
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Apr 6, 2023 13:54
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I have the 1979 book club edition of the OED, it comes in two volumes in a special case with a drawer for a magnifying glass because it's set in like 8 point text.
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Apr 6, 2023 14:01
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Cthulu Carl posted:I have a shelf with a bunch of Haynes manuals, but not the real ones, the fake ones they put out. A few of them are Star Wars and Star Trek, but I also have the ones for Soyuz, Apollo 11, and the Tiger tank. I own multiple Haynes manuals for vehicles I've never owned. I don't know what it is, but sometimes reading about how to remove the transmission from a 1979 Toyota Pickup is just what you need when you're taking a dump.
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Apr 6, 2023 15:48
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Dip Viscous posted:I own multiple Haynes manuals for vehicles I've never owned. I don't know what it is, but sometimes reading about how to remove the transmission from a 1979 Toyota Pickup is just what you need when you're taking a dump. I think some people are just suckers for cutaways and processes. It's me, I'm one of them. I'm just said like they didn't make up maintenance processes for x-wings and TIEs
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Apr 6, 2023 16:22
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Arrhythmia posted:Multiple math professors in university gave me detailed instructions on how to pirate textbooks lol yeah, having to do academic research without sci hub or libgen would be a nightmare
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Apr 6, 2023 16:50
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Arrhythmia posted:Multiple math professors in university gave me detailed instructions on how to pirate textbooks lol My dad is a high school math teacher, and when I went to university I was struggling with the subject so my lecturer arranged a meeting with me. At the meeting my lecturer saw my surname asked me who my dad was, and when I told him he proceeded to pull out multiple calculus books from his shelf and they all had my dad's name written in the cover because we lived in a really low income area and my dad had a habit of giving students his books if they were also poor but loved math. My dad really got a kick out of that story and still tells people about it, lol.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:23
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Cthulu Carl posted:I think some people are just suckers for cutaways and processes. yeah, cause they're trekkies
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May 4, 2023 16:11
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Oh no I have that one, also the Kling Bird of Prey one. There's cutaways and diagrams, but I just wish someone made an entry about how to change the blinker fluid
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May 4, 2023 16:56
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i have The Book of Symbols by The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, that i think is pretty neat. i also don't know if this counts because i do not own it, and i'm not sure it's a reference guide or just a coffee table book, but i have seen and want to own City of Darkness about the Kowloon Walled City.
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May 10, 2023 05:46
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