Do you/Did you sell back textbooks in your major?

[knight_shadow]

Originally Posted by adpiucf

Sell them. They take up space and quickly become obsolete as more current books take their place. If you need reference materials in the future, your employer can order them for you.

Originally Posted by MysticCat

I think I held on to maybe two or three college textbooks (none of which were in my major) and maybe one or two books from law school. All of the others were sold.

Agreed with the bold.

In my major (marketing), there are a few principles that still hold true (ex. 4 Ps), but the industry changes so rapidly that most of the "best practices" that are mentioned become useless within a year.

The books that I kept after graduating were "leisure" books from a reading or poetry class that I took. I held on to them so that I could re-read them and digest the information without the stress of "OMG I HAVE A TEST ABOUT THIS TOMORROW"

[naraht]

I don't think I sold *any* of the books in mathematics major back, but did so for many of the books outside my major. Up until my senior year, I was intending to go to Grad School and so kept them as idea sources for areas of concentration. My senior year I decided I had enough of school and decided to get a job in Computer Programming (which I had sort of kept as a minor)...

In the higher level mathematics courses (beyond Differential Equations) the use of specific textbooks tended to be spotty (the courses weren't necessarily offered two semesters in a row and different profs chose to use different text books.

The ultimate in "non-sellability" was the professor in General Topology (Grad level course) who decided that he wanted to use a book he owned printed in the 1920s as his primary textbook (and yes, this can be done in Mathematics) and tracked down the company who owned the copyright for the book. (The original publisher had been bought out a long time ago). While they weren't willing to print the book, they were willing to let the Professor make copies.

I still enjoy paging through my mathematics text books, but know I won't be able to get too deep in them unless I'm willing to sit down and do the proofs in them. (I'm talking things like Topology, Graph Theory and Projective Geometry).