On: Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner

[look_lookatme]

The No Bullshit Guide To Math And Physics

https://minireference.com/

I bought the Math and Physics copy because it has an ebook option and the first chapter is the Math guide. I’m going through a few pages a day and it’s crisp and straightforward. There is a sample of the first chapter on the site, I suggest you check it out to see if this is what you are looking for.

Found via an HN thread from last year on this topic.

[ivan_ah → look_lookatme]

Ha, I came here to shamelessly self-promote, but I see my book has already been mentioned!

Here is a direct link to the preview: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide_v5_previ...

I won't claim that Chapter 1 is complete and detailed review of all of high school math, but I did my best to cover all the essential topics needed for mechanics and calculus so that the book will be self-contained.

[russfink → ivan_ah]

Is it still in progress, or does the sample omit some information on purpose? E.g the logarithmic operations. Good book, good idea!

[ivan_ah → russfink]

The preview is a "special build" of the book that removes most of the content and leaves only the section formulas and headings --- this way to ensure the internal navigation works, but it's confusing since it looks like chunks are missing. Previously I would cut only selected pages but then the links didn't work. Sorry for the confusion. You can check the preview on amazon for the real page numbers: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0992001005/noBSmathphys

[gherkinnn → ivan_ah]

Great work. I read the sample and bought a copy myself.

[polyphonicist → ivan_ah]

The book looks lovely. Did you write it using latex? What is your tooling to author a book like this?

[ivan_ah → polyphonicist]

Yep, standard LaTeX with the book class.

The preview linked is a little outdated so it shows the old figures, but the latest version has all the figures done in TikZ (a vector drawing package using LaTeX syntax, see https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/TikZ_package for examples).

There is no "tooling" per se for the book production (just run pdflatex to get the PDF, then upload to lulu.com and amazon.com, and they take care of the printing). I do have some scripts to enforce naming and notation conventions though, and there is some advanced git-rebase kung fu going on that allows me to reuse the high school prerequisites from Chapter 1 of the MATH & PHYS book for the LINEAR ALGEBRA book as well (basically when I fix typo in the master branch, I have to rebase the LA branch).

One thing that has been tremendously useful and I highly recommend for any authoring task, is using text-to-speech for proofreading: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...