DON'T BUY UNI TEXTBOOKS YET

FOR ALL THOSE ASKING ABOUT UNI TEXTBOOKS

Golden rule: DONT BUY TEXTBOOKS UNTIL YOUR FIRST LECTURE because your lecturer will tell you what you will and won't need (someone will always stick their hand up and ask "what textbooks do we need") and you'll have PLENTY of time to get them

1 Engineering/Science

Basically never need to buy a textbook. I completed my bachelor and masters in electrical engineering from UNSW without ever buying a textbook. It's likely that you'll end up learning a lot more than you need to know by reading the textbook. Lecturers do not care at all if you don't have it. Pretty much all science/engineering textbooks can be found in pdf versions online, some harder to find than others. (Note: By textbook, I don’t mean course pack, course packs and lab manuals are generally compulsory, but still, don’t buy them until your first lecture)

2 Commerce/Business

The textbook is pretty important if you want to get past a credit average (65%+). There will be a prescribed textbook and a recommended one. The prescribed textbook is the one you should buy, and since everyone in the year above you had the textbook as well, it’s super easy to find them second hand. Lecturers generally won’t care if you have them or not but will often give you homework questions from the textbook. See which topics are assessed from the lecture notes and read up on those sections in the textbook. SECRET PROTIP: buy the “test bank” for both the prescribed textbook AND recommended one before your exams. You’ll often see that the questions in your finals will come from these test banks. (They’d be around $30 each which is a huge win if you’re trying to get high marks or cram for the exam).

3 Arts

There is a huge variety of arts courses so refer to the golden rule. They will give you readings to do for homework and they are usually online or printed out for you. You should do these readings cause you’ll often have to discuss what you read in class.

4 Law

The prescribed textbook is generally considered compulsory. The lecturers are pretty anal about it and during class, they’ll say “everyone open to page x”. Again since everyone had them in the year above they should be relatively easy to find second hand. They might be older editions (which means the page numbers will be off a little - but you’ll save a lot of money). Similar to arts you’ll have a shitload of compulsory weekly readings to do from the textbook (hope you like reading). You can also often find these books in the library too if you’re super broke, you might want to get in and borrow it early.

Rank of most important to get textbooks to least important is:

Law
Commerce/Business
Arts
Engineering/Science

List of places you can buy second hand textbooks from:

1 Facebook groups - uni relevant marketplace, eg textbook exchange, type in “textbook exchange” in the facebook search and search groups.

2 Google “uni textbooks” (zookal, jekkle, studentvip - you can sell them your old textbook too)

Find textbooks online:

2. Just google it lol

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