Chapter One: MIT Manipal Coursebooks

A little something for my juniors. As soon as you reach Manipal, do not rush to buy any coursebooks. The reason is that MIT provides you with all required study material in the form of slides. Slides here refer to PPTs, reading material, PDFs, etc., but whatever in the course will be there in the slides MIT provides you. Nothing in the exam comes from outside the slides and a lot of questions come directly from the slides itself, values unchanged sometimes. Plus reference books have a lot of unwanted additional stuff that you might wanna stay away from.

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Three days after I came to Manipal in my freshman year, everyone around my hostel room were rushing to buy books for the semester. I remember that I was about the only one who didn’t get a single book. Now of these people who did get the books, half of them never had to open it, half of the other half who did use those books found that they studied a shit load of stuff just to find out everything in the exam came from the slides and then stopped using those books from the next test onwards; half of the other half of this half who actually did study those books religiously didn’t get that much of a benefit form it either. A lot of of these people who did get the books in the first semester didn’t get books for the 2nd semester.

The only book you might actually need is EVS. For this subject, you’ll be better of studying from the book, cause questions come directly from the book and seldom from the slides. For me, I didn’t even get that book and just shared it with my roommate. Also you could get a book for C++ if you are new to it. You could also invest in the Mathematics textbook. That will last you a good 4 semesters.

So simply speaking, think if you really need those books and save yourselves a couple of thousand bucks. If you are gonna use them very rarely, you could go to the library, or you could always borrow from your peers; there will always be some people who will surely buy the books. And if practice questions are what you are looking for, use the thing called the internet.

And yet I know some people prefer studying from a physical medium than an electronic one. So if you are one of those book people, yeah, go get those books, but you’ll surely also end up looking at the slides too. If you want, you could selectively get the books you’d actually need (like say Math) and not buying all the books for the entire semester in one go. You can get both fresh books and second-hand ones at the bookstore, or buy it from a senior.

1 Comment

  1. Well if ur coming to MIT just to pass exams then u needn’t buy books but if u really wanna learn something the books are a must….the slides cover the portion pretty well that comes for the exams but the portion itself is very diluted and only a small part of a chapter is included in the portion….so if u want to be thorough with the subject and really wanna do engineering like how its done….buy books and study from them itself.
    I did so myself.
    But then again this is my opinion and everyone’s entitled to have theirs!

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