I join NihilCredo and lukeprog in this. Textbooks usually have less text than what I would find ideal, not more. Lecture notes (and many textbooks which seemingly obey the even formula to text ratio) take me more time to read than a book which contains the same number of formulas and four times as much text. I can’t continue reading after having stumbled upon something which looks like an inconsistency, non-sequitur or counterintuitive definition (that usually first happens on page 5 or so) and then have to spend time trying to find out what is wrong (and if I fail, then must spend some more time persuading myself that it doesn’t matter and reading can continue). On the other hand, if the author spends some time and pages explaining, such events occur much less frequently.
You guys do what works for you, and I’ll do what works for me. Maybe I just don’t have the patience. Or maybe you don’t have something required to understand lossily compressed info. Or both. I just know that books take all day long and help as much as short online tutorials. And the tutorials are often free.
If lecture notes contain as much relevant information as a book, then you should be able to, given a set of notes, write a terse but comprehensible textbook. If you’re genuinely able to get that much out of notes, then yes that definitely works for you.
The concern is instead if reading a textbook only conveys a sparse, unconvincing, and context-free set of notes (which is my general impression of most lecture notes I’ve seen).
Both depend heavily on the quality of notes, textbook, subject, and the learning style you use, but I think it’s a lot of people’s experience that lecture notes alone convey only a cursory understanding of a topic. Practically enough sometimes, test-taking enough surely, but never too many steps toward mastery.
I join NihilCredo and lukeprog in this. Textbooks usually have less text than what I would find ideal, not more. Lecture notes (and many textbooks which seemingly obey the even formula to text ratio) take me more time to read than a book which contains the same number of formulas and four times as much text. I can’t continue reading after having stumbled upon something which looks like an inconsistency, non-sequitur or counterintuitive definition (that usually first happens on page 5 or so) and then have to spend time trying to find out what is wrong (and if I fail, then must spend some more time persuading myself that it doesn’t matter and reading can continue). On the other hand, if the author spends some time and pages explaining, such events occur much less frequently.
You guys do what works for you, and I’ll do what works for me. Maybe I just don’t have the patience. Or maybe you don’t have something required to understand lossily compressed info. Or both. I just know that books take all day long and help as much as short online tutorials. And the tutorials are often free.
How about you start a thread for recommending online tutorials?
If lecture notes contain as much relevant information as a book, then you should be able to, given a set of notes, write a terse but comprehensible textbook. If you’re genuinely able to get that much out of notes, then yes that definitely works for you.
The concern is instead if reading a textbook only conveys a sparse, unconvincing, and context-free set of notes (which is my general impression of most lecture notes I’ve seen).
Both depend heavily on the quality of notes, textbook, subject, and the learning style you use, but I think it’s a lot of people’s experience that lecture notes alone convey only a cursory understanding of a topic. Practically enough sometimes, test-taking enough surely, but never too many steps toward mastery.