Question for all you brilliant people.
I’m still working on my Associate’s at the moment, and it will be probably at least another year before I switch schools and start my science pre-reqs, but I would really like to do some studying on my own before I start the classes, particularly for the areas of science I haven’t studied before, so I’m planning to buy some of the textbooks and start my own learning ahead of time.
I’ve been looking around online for the lists of the most popular textbooks, mainly for General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Physics, but I thought I would ask you knowledgeable people which texts you’ve used in recent years? Which ones you might recommend?
Any purchase suggestions would be muchly appreciated.
Thanks!
Elizabeth
David Klein for Ochem hands down. You can’t go wrong with that one.
Gen chem will be more of a toss up. Usually the best texts will be the ones with the strongest solutions manual. For my gen chem I used the Theodore E. Brown text and the solutions manual was great. I still refer to that text for explanations to MCAT questions.
Physics, I’m currently using the Walker text and I hate it! …with a passion. The solutions manual is a joke and you’ll spend most of your precious time finding the answers to questions from YouTube videos or Decyphering Chegg responses. If I find a good text with a good solutions manual I’ll post it and let you know but off the top of my head I can’t think of any…
Chemistry by Nivaldo Tro seems to be widely used - every school in this area (and I have been at several at the same time) use the Tro.
Wade’s Organic Chemistry has a new edition out - and it is the same publisher as the Tro text.
I have not noticed any pattern for physics.
Khanacademy.org
Learn it all conceptually from there and get a book like Schuam’s the Outline series for problems in physics/chem. Get 1,001 Biology questions from Examkrackers and do the chapter questions from there based on where you’re at in Khan’s bio section.
That would be really cheap and I would do that if I could go back to when I was just starting out.
Orgo is a difficult enough course that there are a lot of supplemental study guides on the market with titles like It’s not that bad, really! and Put down the gun, there are better options. The issue is that they’re all different and people tend to recommend one over the other not because one is inherently better, but because worked better for them. Go on Amazon and read reviews, you’ll quickly see not only which ones people liked, but what about the books they liked.
Personally, I think people should do more to credit YouTube as a source of information. YT certainly isn’t new, but there’s a wealth of academic stuff like “here’s how a single-replacement reaction works” that you couldn’t find just a few years back.
Thank you ALL so much for the help! 
Have been following everyone’s suggestions and advice and looking everything up, and I now have a lot to work from.
Thank you!
You are all awesome.
Becker’s World of the cell
Brocks Biology of microorganisms
or just some MCAT review books so you can get a feel for what material you should really pay attention to
- actowery Said:
Brocks Biology of microorganisms
Thank you! Will track those down.
- In reply to:
Excellent suggestion, I had been dabbling in that myself already. You know, I did find it amusing when I looked over some samples on the vocabulary section...apparently being 40 and a writer vs a 22 year old science geek has taken care of most of the vocabulary issues for me, I couldn't believe those were words I was supposed to find challenging. LOL Which is nice, I can focus more heavily on the science part!:D