Textbooks - Blog Posts

Beware!

I just watched a kid break down in the bookstore because his books for the semester totaled $600 and that’s the american university system in a nutshell

Let’s all help college students get knowledge they deserve for free:)

http://gen.lib.rus.ec

http://textbooknova.com

http://en.bookfi.org/

http://www.gutenberg.org

http://ebookee.org

http://www.manybooks.net

http://www.giuciao.com

http://www.feedurbrain.com

http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=380

http://www.alleng.ru/ 

http://www.eknigu.com/ 

http://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/

http://2020ok.com/

http://www.freebookspot.es/Default.aspx

http://www.freeetextbooks.com/

http://onebigtorrent.org/

http://www.downeu.me/ebook/

http://forums.mvgroup.org

http://theaudiobookbay.com/

More Here

do u have any advice for ppl who want to study linguistics and languages but couldnt afford to study it at school?? thanks if you answer this, have a great day

yeah! you can easily download textbooks online and study from them AND I do have a dropbox full of linguistics textbooks!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qm7x5dz8fu4bdlp/AADshTfRGZG5JZALkDV6wFlwa?dl=0 

it includes phonetics/phonology, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, morphology, and etymology. 

I also have another dropbox folder full of language textbooks:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tdm26h60ccl9pe1/AABg0B3mOGaWLG9Kfyuvut6wa?dl=0

As of November 6: Includes 83 textbooks including Arabic, ASL, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh :)

Routledge Masterpost

Here are all of the Routledge Grammar PDFs that I currently have. I’ll be updating whenever I find more. Let me know if there’s one in particular you want me to look for^^

Last Update: 2017/04/24

Fixed Intermediate Japanese: A Grammar and Workbook link 

Added books for Czech, English, French, French Creoles, Persian, Ukranian

Added more books in Cantonese, Danish, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Swedish

Arabic

Arabic: An Essential Grammar Basic Arabic: A Grammar and Workbook Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar

Cantonese

Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar Intermediate Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook

Czech

Czech: An Essential Grammar

Danish

Danish: A Comprehensive Grammar Danish: An Essential Grammar

Dutch

Basic Dutch: A Grammar and Workbook Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar Dutch: An Essential Grammar Intermediate Dutch: A Grammar and Workbook

English

English: An Essential Grammar

Finnish

Finnish: An Essential Grammar

French

Modern French Grammar Workbook

French Creoles

French Creoles: A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar

German

Basic German: A Grammar and Workbook German: An Essential Grammar Intermediate German: A Grammar and Workbook

Greek

Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar Greek: An Essential Grammar of the Modern Language

Hindi

Hindi: An Essential Grammar

Hebrew

Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar

Hungarian

Hungarian: An Essential Grammar

Indonesian

Indonesian: A Comprehensive Grammar

Irish

Basic Irish: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Irish: A Grammar and Workbook

Italian

Basic Italian: A Grammar and Workbook

Japanese

Basic Japanese: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Japanese: A Grammar and Workbook Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar

Korean

Basic Korean: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Korean: A Grammar and Workbook Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar

Latin

Intensive Basic Latin: A Grammar and Workbook Intensive Intermediate Latin: A Grammar and Workbook

Latvian

Latvian: An Essential Grammar

Mandarin Chinese

Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar Chinese: An Essential Grammar

Norwegian

Norwegian: An Essential Grammar

Persian

Basic Persian: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Persian: A Grammar and Workbook

Polish

Basic Polish: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Polish: A Grammar and Workbook Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar Polish: An Essential Grammar

Portuguese

Portuguese: An Essential Grammar

Romanian

Romanian: An Essential Grammar

Russian

Basic Russian: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Russian: A Grammar and Workbook

Serbian

Serbian: An Essential Grammar

Spanish

Basic Spanish: A Grammar and Workbook Intermediate Spanish: A Grammar and Workbook Spanish: An Essential Grammar

Swahili

Swahili Grammar and Workbook

Swedish

Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar Swedish: An Essential Grammar

Thai

Thai: An Essential Grammar

Turkish

Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Ukrainian

Ukrainian: A Comprehensive Grammar

Urdu

Urdu: An Essential Grammar

Welsh

Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar

Yiddish

Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Textbook

Hope this helps everyone out a bit! Happy studying^^

-koreanbreeze

*More tags to be specific

I’m looking more specifically at Iran and Persia as a topic now! I’m going to pin down a specific topic for presentation in the coming weeks!

Hey! By chance, does anyone know if there are any databases of world folklore and ancient cultures/civilizations? Doing some research for projects.

Bonus points if:

- the databases include photos of excavations, paintings, and pottery.

- includes ancient poetry and music

- includes some kind of timeline/adjustable filters

Bonus Bonus points if the website are devoted to ancient Africa and The Middle East/ the Arab world.

Hey! By chance, does anyone know if there are any databases of world folklore and ancient cultures/civilizations? Doing some research for projects.

Bonus points if:

- the databases include photos of excavations, paintings, and pottery.

- includes ancient poetry and music

- includes some kind of timeline/adjustable filters

Bonus Bonus points if the website are devoted to ancient Africa and The Middle East/ the Arab world.

I’m not sure whether I love or hate that modern math textbook word problems are more diverse than modern media

Step it up media.

*my textbooks glaring at me*

me: *proceeds to reread the same three books for the 1000th time*

I started a new vocab book! Finally! I am so excited because I’ve been stuck on that 쏙쏙 TOPIK book for so long, but finally pushed through and memorized all the words that were left. I really like this new book pictured on the left (토픽 어휘 2300) because they organize it by themes rather than going alphabetically. It’s also bigger and feels much more like a textbook, which I love. Going to try to finish this book in two months!

dropbox containing linguistics textbooks

contains 34 textbooks including etymology, language acquisition, morphology, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, & translation studies

dropbox containing language textbooks

contains 86 language textbooks including ASL, Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew (Modern & Ancient), Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh

dropbox containing books about language learning

includes fluent forever by gabriel wyner, how to learn any language by barry farber, polyglot by kató lomb

if there’s a problem with any of the textbooks or if you want to request materials for a specific language feel free to message me!

This is a summary of college only using two pictures; expensive as hell.

That’s my Sociology “book”. In fact what it is is a piece of paper with codes written on it to allow me to access an electronic version of a book. I was told by my professor that I could not buy any other paperback version, or use another code, so I was left with no option other than buying a piece of paper for over $200. Best part about all this is my professor wrote the books; there’s something hilariously sadistic about that. So I pretty much doled out $200 for a current edition of an online textbook that is no different than an older, paperback edition of the same book for $5; yeah, I checked. My mistake for listening to my professor.

This is why we download. 

 Alternatives to buying overpriced textbooks

Textbooknova 

Reddit

Bookboon 

Textbookrevolution 

GaTech Math Textbooks

Ebookee 

Freebookspot 

Free-ebooks

Getfreeebooks 

BookFinder

Oerconsortium 

Project Gutenberg

4 Legal Ways To Get Free Textbooks.

1. Open Culture:  Not a large a selection, but high quality texts. If you just want to skim a book to brush up on a course you took in ninth grade, download one of these. I have yet to be disappointed.

2. Book Boon: Provides free college-level textbooks in a PDF format. Probably the widest range of subjects on the web. The site is also pretty.

3. Flat World Knowledge: The worlds largest publisher of free and open college textbooks. Humanitie texts are particularly difficult to come by, this site has a great selection in all disciplines.

4. Textbook Revolution:  Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content.

5. Library Pirate: I’ve always had an addiction to torrent based pirating. When this site opened a few months ago, I went a little overboard. After dropping two hundred on a paperback spanish textbook, I downloaded the ebook version illegally. I also got a great Psyc text i’m obsessed with.  It will be interesting to see how this site grows- they already have a great selection. 

fiction is my addiction, and since it’s almost the summer, i thought i’d share some ways to get free ebooks or save some money to get more books so you could have something to get lost in over the summer. while this list has a lot of ya resources, there’s still something at the end if you’re looking for something more academic

free ebooks:

project gutenberg is always worth mentioning, because come on, it has 50,000 books in its collection. that’s a lot of books, and you can always catch up on the grimm’s fairy tales

riveted lit is run by the publisher simon and schuster, and they put books up that you can read for a limited time. if you’re looking for something more ya, this is a great place to start

bookbub has more discounted ebooks than free ones, but let’s care about the free ones. you get a daily email with a bunch of discounted or free books

free audiobooks:

sync is my absolute favorite thing. it gives away two free audiobooks, one clasic and one more contemporary, every week over the course of the summer. it starts on may 5 for 2016, and there’s an amazing lineup for anyone who loves to read young adult like i do (they’re going to have i’ll give you the sun, boy meets boy, and on the jellicoe road) and there’s even a nelson mandela’s history on week 12. it’s all free anyway, so why not?

audible allows you to get two free audiobooks in your trial, and if you always wanted to hear a celebrity narrate that classic you never wanted to pick up, you can find something to fulfill that. 

hey, it’s project gutenberg again. not only do they have audiobooks, but they have audiobooks in other languages such as chinese, korean, spanish, and many more. if you wanted to test your comprehension of a foreign language in a new way, well, there you go

cheap books:

the book depository and wordery have free worldwide shipping for all you international people looking for that amazing book that your bookstore refuses to stock

if you live in the uk, the book people has some really amazing deals 

if you live in the us, there’s book outlet. the prices are phenomenal and i want to cry because they don’t ship cheaply to me

saving money

if you buy something using ebates, you can get a rebate. buying something from book outlet? get a 10% rebate while you’re at it. it even has rebates for university bookstores like the stanford university bookstore. also, for your first time, you can get $10 back along with the original rebate. plus, it’s awesome how it’s for more than just books, because you can get a rebate for clothing stores or ebay. you can look at the full list of stores here.

if you have any questions, you could always drop by and ask. i hope these help you to get something to read!

how i spent only $34 to purchase $1,000+ worth of school supplies for college

One thing I’ve found that many college freshmen do is they purchase everything at the school bookstore, shelling out more than $800 for what they think is the cheapest deal possible. Let me tell you now, that you’re doin’ it wrong if you think paying hundreds of dollars is the best you can do. 

To put it into perspective, for this past year, if I purchased all of my required textbooks from my school book store I would have had to pay $1,466 (tax not included)–and this is the total calculated if I bought used textbooks only. If I wanted brand new textbooks, it would have been over $2,000 (tax not included). In the end, I only spent $34 to purchase an entire year’s worth of supplies (that’s a 97% discount!!!), and I will tell you how. Of course, how low you can go will depend on the type of textbooks your professors require you to have and if you need any online access codes.

1. Email your professors

A lot of professors receive compensation from publishing companies to include their books in the curriculum, so many professors will say a book is required when in reality, you probably read 4 paragraphs from that text in the course of a semester. Always e-mail your professors beforehand about the list of required texts and other required items so see how many times you really need that book or item.

For example, at the beginning of fall semester last year, one of the required items listed for lab was lab cartridges which cost $88. Before making the decision on whether to purchase that or not, I e-mailed the lab coordinator and asked about what the cartridges were, which labs they corresponded to, and how often we would need to use them. The response? We didn’t need them at all for lab. If I didn’t ask my professor about it beforehand, I could have potentially paid $88 for something I didn’t need. 

2. Join your school’s Facebook network.

Most, if not all, colleges will have a network on Facebook. Whenever you get your admission e-mail, or in your school’s portal, there should be a link to join the main Facebook group. Through there, once you’re accepted, you should be able to access many other Facebook groups within the school network. Many colleges will have a group dedicated to students who are selling their old stuff, and many will sell their textbooks on there as well.

Freshman year, I paid $150 for my general chemistry textbook, the solutions manual to the chemistry textbook, general biology textbook, lab manual, lab goggles, and clicker by purchasing them from a student who took those courses already and had no use for them anymore. To put into perspective how much I saved, the general biology textbook itself retailed for $150 in the campus bookstore; and the total amount I would have had to pay if I purchased all those books from the bookstore would have been more than $560. I basically purchased this at a 75% discount! 

I would consider that purchasing from students at your university is generally a safe transaction, as most people meet up on campus to exchange the cash for the product, but remember to always exercise caution. You can always ask the seller to send you more detailed pictures if you want to know more about the condition of the item, and most of the time, you can also try to haggle the price of the item down. 

3. Try to find online PDFs

One of the biggest reasons why I was able to save so much money this year with my textbooks was because of online PDFs (bless those uploaders). I was able to download my organic chemistry textbook and solutions manual, and molecular cell biology textbook online for free. If I had to purchase them from the campus bookstore, I would have had to pay $917. That’s a lot of money I saved!

Generally speaking, textbook versions don’t really vary much. For the organic chemistry PDF I mentioned, I actually found the previous edition of the one we were required to have for the course. I e-mailed my professor and asked if there was any particular difference between the 3rd and 4th edition, and he responded saying that other than the fact that some content in one chapter was moved to the next, there was no difference, and there really wasn’t. Even the chapter problems were the exact same. 

If you’re the style that likes to have a paper copy in their hands, you can always print out the PDFs. 

4. Share with friends

As a biology major, we have many labs, and for those labs, we’re required to purchase a lab manual. This past year, I took orgo lab, and the lab manual for that was $143. I couldn’t find this online as a PDF because A) it was the newest edition for this year, and B) it was written by our lab coordinator so it couldn’t be found anywhere else. So I chose option C instead: share with a friend. One of my friends compared the previous year’s edition with the edition we were required to have to see if there were any big differences (such as different experiments), and there weren’t really, so she purchased last year’s lab manual from an upperclassman for $25 (I paid $12 since we were sharing). Since we had lab on different days, we were able to share the manual. 

I also made scans of the manual as well so I wouldn’t hog it when she needed it to complete her conclusions, and she could use the scans for her pre-lab while I was using it to write my conclusions.

5. Don’t buy, rent instead

If you absolutely have to have a book and you can’t find it online as a PDF, see if you can rent it instead. Although your campus bookstore will also have rental prices, 3rd party rental prices are almost always cheaper. Two sites I highly recommend are Chegg and Bookbyte. Although I haven’t used Chegg personally, many of my friends do and they say Chegg’s prices are lower. I’ve personally used Bookbyte, and although their selection is a tad smaller than Chegg, they have great customer service. In addition, if you need your rental for a couple days past the rental date, you can send it back late (up to 12 days I believe) without being charged any additional fees or paying for an extension. 

For example, if I were to rent the anthropology textbook from my bookstore would have costed $40, and renting from Amazon would have cost $35, however, Bookbyte had my anthropology textbook listed for $12 to rent. They actually sent me 2 copies of it (I was only charged for one), and both were in excellent condition. When the time comes for you to return your textbooks, just print out the pre-paid shipping label Bookbyte sends you and you can ship the book from your campus mailroom.

6. Ask upperclassmen

Second semester this year, I was able to get my hands on a hard copy of the newest edition of the orgo textbook and solutions manual for free, because one of my upperclassmen friends passed it down to me without asking me to pay, so she’s basically the nicest person ever. You can always ask upperclassmen friends first for textbooks and such if they’re the same major as you because chances are, they’ll still have their old textbooks and would most likely be much more willing to help out a friend than a student they don’t know. 

7. DON’T BUY “USED” ONLINE ACCESS CODES

The only thing you cannot get a discount on are online access codes. Any sites that are selling “used” online access codes are fake, and you should not purchase from them. Online access codes are associated with specific professors and courses, and e-mails as well. In addition, most have a set expiration date (usually a year or a semester), so any “used” online access code will most likely have expired by the time you try to use it. 

What I usually do if I have to have an online code is accept their free trial. Companies such as McGraw Hill’s Connect have a 2 week free trial, and since my professors put up all the assignments in advance, I complete all the assignments within the free trial period. When the free trial expires, I can’t access the module again unless I pay, but the records of me completing my assignment still exist and I still get my homework points. I was lucky enough that our professor assigned online HW as easy gimme points, so I didn’t have to wait until he taught the material to finish it. The only online homework I paid for was Sapling, which was $10 since the free trial was only 6 days and homework assignments were uploaded weekly. 

College Textbook Lifehacks

Okay so it’s not the beginning of a semester but whatever. While I’m thinking about it, let me, a bonafide degree holder learn you some knowledge about college textbooks so you don’t have to take out a mortgage or try to short the market just so you can have a $1,000 paperweight that you never read.

Rule #1 I don’t care what your syllabus says or what your pre-semester welcome email from your professor says or what the bookstore website says, don’t buy the book before classes begin. Show up the first day and ask the professor if the book is necessary for passing the class. Sometimes, it’s not. Sometimes the professor teaches from his or her own memory and never consults the course textbook. If this is the case, unless you just love reading textbooks or want to keep them for whatever occupation you pursue once you have your degree, don’t get the book and save yourself some money. If he or she can teach the course without a book, you can pass it without a book.

Rule # 2 If your professor’s response is yes, you absolutely do need the book, ask them how different the required issue is from previous issues. Book publishers are dirty swindlers and will release a new edition of each book every year or two. Often times the new edition has minor changes like maybe now chapter 14 is split up into two chapters or they changed a couple of the review questions. If an older edition will suffice, just like iPhones, they will be a lot cheaper than the newest edition and you have a better chance of finding an even cheaper used copy which brings me to rule 3.

Rule # 3 Don’t buy the books from your university. Like publishing companies, universities also tend to be dirty swindlers. Copy the ISBN listed for your textbook and paste that shit into a site like half.com valorebooks.com or amazon.com where you will find discounted versions of most every textbook. You could also try to torrent them off of those sketchy russian sites that are listed under that post with the “Leak college textbook PDF’s not nudes” tweet but when that doesn’t work, you go to those sites I listed. Now you have to choose what quality you want, this is important because it can affect the resale value which I’ll talk about later. Obviously the higher the quality (New, Used-Like New etc.) will give you book without creases, markings etc. but will be more expensive. If you don’t care about this (again I’ll explain why you might care in rule 4), maybe go for the rental if the rental is cheaper than purchasing a high quality book-ONLY DO THIS IF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT RESALE AND DON’T TEND TO MARK IN YOUR BOOKS. Otherwise, the choice is yours. Now you might ask, what will I do for the two weeks it takes to ship my book? This is where making friends in class comes in handy, just ask them to borrow their book for the time being, or better yet, if you have a close friend already in the class, split the cost of the book 50/50 and share it. If neither of these options work for you, visit your professor in his or her office hours, give them some BS like “I’m so sorry professor, I think I mixed up the shipping and billing address so it’s taking forever for the book to get here boo hoo feel bad for me.” Usually, professors have no problem photocopying the first chapter of the book for you or will be a little lenient with deadlines for the whole class if you’re not the only one. This is fun because not only do you get away with not buying the book right away, but you’re a hero for your class.

Rule #4 Even though it’s the beginning of the semester, think ahead to the end of the semester. Your university is going to offer to buy back your books at the end of the semester. Do not sell them your books, I repeat DO NOT SELL THEM YOUR BOOKS. Those dirty swindlers that sold you an overpriced book a few months ago? Yeah they’re going to buy it back for $5.00 or less. I don’t care if it’s a 10 lb, 700 page biology textbook that’s still in the plastic wrap, you will get cheated. Sell them on amazon. Seller accounts are free and though you aren’t likely to get 100% of what you paid for it back, you will make much more money selling there than you would to the school. If you bought the higher quality book and kept it in decent shape, you’ll get some good beer money. If you went with the $0.99 acceptable condition book, maybe don’t try and sell it on amazon because you’ll pay more to ship it than you’ll receive profit this is why it’s important to take into consideration whether or not you think you will mark up your book. Rentals are cheaper than buying new but you can’t mark them and can’t sell them but don’t worry, there’s other places you can sell your book if you bought a crappy one. Find out if your school has a student run for sale Facebook group (hint, it probably does, especially if you’re at a large state-school), advertise your books on the page and sell them for cash to a fellow student. 

Rule #5 Sorry to say, but these rules don’t work for every course. You might have that professor that wrote their own book and makes you buy it which means you can’t find it on any third party website. When this happens, the most you can do is see if someone who has already taken the course still has their book so you can buy it from them. You can also leave a scathing review during evaluations at the end of the semester and on RateMyProfessor.com which may not do much but is good for the soul. 

Also, especially for labs and beginning language courses, you may need to buy a workbook. Used ones are hard to come by but they do exist thanks to people like me who do their assignments on a separate sheet of paper so they don’t have to mark up the textbook and can resell it later (I advise doing this). This works for language courses, I don’t know how well it works for labs since I am not a science student, if it does work-sweet and if not-I’m truly sorry.

These are my rules and I promise they work. If any one else has additional hacks that they’ve figured out I’d love to hear them! Seriously, doing these things saved me a load of money. 

Medical Textbooks (PDF versions)

Hi Everyone!!

I was asked by @dankamphetamemes to share my holy grail textbooks and I did, but I thought I’d do you guys one better. I recommended that you should check them out in PDF versions before you buy them because honestly they’ll burn a hole through your pocket - so I gathered all the books I use and a couple of others for you to check out!! 

Heres a list of books you’ll find in my google drive:

- Robbins and Cotran’s Pathological Basis of Disease

- BRS Pathology

- Lippincott’s Biochemistry

- Lippincott’s Pharmacology

- Physiology by Linda Costanzo

- BRS Physiology

- Moore’s Clinically Oriented Anatomy

- Gray’s Anatomy Flashcards 

- Unfortunately I couldn’t find a PDF version of Medical Microbiology by David Greenwood - Ill keep looking and upload it when I find it

Extra books/flashcards:

- Guyton and Hall Textbook of Physiology

- Clinical Microbiology made ridiculously simple

- Netters Anatomy Flashcards

- Snells Clinical anatomy by regions

If you happen to face any trouble downloading them or accessing them shoot me a message and let me know

Here’s the link - enjoy!!

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0ByVv1ccrvWveUGVuZFRCQWp3MDQ&usp=sharing

Medical Student Resources 101

I’ve been thinking about this post for quite a while now, and I have finally decided how I want to approach it. If you have any suggestions, please comment or message me! So, when I started medical school 18 months ago all I had available to me was a crazy long list of textbooks recommended by the university. It has been an uphill battle figuring out what textbooks are helpful and which are less than helpful. So this is my masterpost of resources I’ve used for medical school thus far, organised by systems! 

Basics

You’ll need a good anatomy atlas, physiology text and pathophysiology book as a bare minimum. Most universities also guide you towards a clinical skills book of some sort.

Anatomy: 

Rohen and Yokochi “Color Atlas of Anatomy: A Photographic Study of the Human Body”

I used an old version of this book, and it was amazing for our human dissection block, I would strongly recommend it. 

Physiology:

Boron “Medical Physiology”

Guyton and Hall  “Textbook of Medical Physiology”

I used a combination of these two, Boron can be very heavy, so I only used it for topics I had a really good grasp of and wanted to know more about. I would recommend Guyton over Boron if you can only get one. 

Pathophysiology:

Robbins and Cotran “Pathologic Basis of Disease”

This is one of the best books ever written. I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

Clinical and Practical Skills:

Talley and O’Connor “Clinical Examination” 

This was recommended by my university. It is a good textbook, however I’ve recently discovered: 

Thomas and Monaghan “Oxford Handbook of Clinical Examination and Practical Skills”

and I personally prefer this, but it is much more concise, so Talley is great for all the background information. 

Cardiovascular

Lilly “Pathophysiology of Heart Disease” 

This textbook is fantastic, very easy to read and covered all of our cardiovascular block thoroughly.

Respiratory

West “Respiratory Physiology: The Essentials”

This book can be a bit hit and miss. I really didn’t like respiratory physiology, so I struggled a bit with this one, I used a combination of Guyton and Hall, and West. For pathophysiology you can’t go wrong with Robbins and Cotran.

Genitourinary

I didn’t use a specialised book for this block. For physiology I used Boron, which was insanely hard as a first year student. I also used Guyton and Hall at the end of the block, which was much better. So I’d definitely recommend Guyton and Hall for physiology and Robbins and Cotran for pathophysiology. 

Gastrointestinal

Chew “Crash Course Gastrointestinal System 3e” 

I really liked this book for this book, I thought it covered the hepatic system very well, overall it was very easy to read and understand. This book and Guyton and Hall if you wanted to supplement it would be great. As always, Robbins and Cotran for indepth pathophysiology. 

Endocrine and Reproductive

Porterfield and White “Endocrine Physiology”

This was one of my favourite blocks! The university recommended Greenspan’s “Basic and Clinical Endocrinology”, which for what we needed was probably too much. I found a fantastic little orange book at the library, which I will need to go get the name of, so keep an eye on this if you need a good endocrinology book. UPDATE: little orange book found!

Psychiatry

Kaplan and Saddock’s “Synopsis of Psychiatry”

This is actually a really great book for any psychiatry you might do. We only used it for four weeks, but I’d definitely recommend hiring a copy if you can! 

Neurology and Neuroanatomy

Yogarajah “Crash Course Neurology, 4e” 

Fix “BRS Neuroanatomy”

Young “Basic Clinical Neuroscience”

This has been an incredibly hard block to find a good text for, at a reasonable price. These two have been very helpful, and I find them easy to read. Only time will tell if it has been enough to pass! Update: Young’s book is also excellent!

Musculoskeletal

Jenkins “Hollinshead’s Functional Anatomy of the Limbs and Back”

This is the most amazing textbook for any block of all time ever. Literally. It is so good! I’ve used a combination of this book, and:

Moore and Dalley’s “Clinically Oriented Anatomy” 

for our musculoskeletal block. It’s been absolutely fantastic. I’ve enjoyed it so much! I would also recommend investing in some quality flashcards. I have:

Hansen “Netter’s Anatomy Flash Cards”

Which have been great, another really great resource has been WinkingSkull.com, which you do have to pay for, but it is helpful! 

Other

So, there are a few other resources I’ve used that have been very helpful. Mostly online databases and websites but I thought it would be handy to have them. Many (most?) universities have subscriptions to them so try your university library website! 

UpToDate: www.UpToDate.com 

Everything you ever needed about anything in medicine

Best Practice: www.bestpractice.bmj.com 

This is my favourite resource. Ever. It goes through signs, symptoms, risk factors, diagnostics, differentials, everything. It is a small slice of heaven in medical school.

Lancet Review Articles 

There were a really great series on Immunology in The Lancet, I would strongly recommend trying to find them for a concise overview of immunology

Life In The Fast Lane: www.lifeinthefastlane.com

Great series on ECGs!

Radiopedia: www.radiopaedia.org

These guys are great for understanding what you’re actually supposed to be seeing on any radiological film. I’ve been using it a lot for musculoskeletal, looking at Le Fort fractures, etc. 

Toronto Notes

So I just borrowed a friend’s copy of Toronto, but I believe there may be online access. Maybe an online version. It’s great for an overview and is a little more clinically focused. I really liked it for gastrointestinal, psychiatry and neurology.

Anatomy Zone 

There’s a website and a YouTube channel with great tutorials and information for anatomy, particularly musculoskeletal. I’ve found it immensely helpful whilst studying for this block! 

I know I’ve probably missed a few things, I’ll add them as I think of them but I hope this helps a few pre-clinical medical students out there! If it’s helpful I’ll keep you posted as I move into my clinical years on new texts and resources I find helpful! 

Where do you recommend getting textbooks from? (renting, buying, online etc)

well textbook companies are evil and sometimes you have no choice but to buy a textbook new, but for other times where that’s not the case i’d recommend you check out slugbooks! ^_^ they compare a bunch of different sites selling the textbook you need so you can find it at the cheapest price :) it’s like the kayak of academia lol!