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Do you still use reference books?

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roygerdodger
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06 Nov 2009, 10:11 pm

I still use textbooks, encyclopedias, and dictionaries every now and then, but I know in some classes nowadays, they use the internet to look up stuff for assignments.



southwestforests
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06 Nov 2009, 11:18 pm

roygerdodger wrote:
Do you still use reference books?


If more than dictionaries and all are included, absolutely yes, especially for train stuff and model train stuff.


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visagrunt
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06 Nov 2009, 11:53 pm

I like the look and feel of classic books. But who can afford them at home?


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Michael_Stuart
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07 Nov 2009, 5:09 am

I have a fancy encyclopedia, but it can't give the same amount of information Wikipedia or other sources can, so it's not very useful. I do however often use my gargantuan Oxford dictionary.



aleclair
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07 Nov 2009, 9:33 pm

It feels that now, even what we'd call the "books" are all on the Interwebs. I'm referring here only to scholarly sources - not user-made content like Wikipedia. If I need a scholarly journal article for a paper, we have a million billion databases at my university that I can do a full-text search in. Likewise for things like the OED: I can just get that online if I am on campus.

That being said, I am a math major, and the mathematics parts of Wikipedia are just about as scholarly and well-researched as the typical math textbook. However, you need a ton of math background, most of which I do not have yet, to understand the bulk of it. However, there are enough free, respectable math texts online that if you had the algebra/trig/calculus background, you could learn any aspect of math you wanted.

Certainly, real books are nice, but in the end, it's about impossible to do a text search in a book, say, if you are looking for a particular quotation and you forget its page number. So I could live without reference books. When reading for fun, though, I need to look at a real book: the computer screen gets tiring fast.



GoonSquad
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07 Nov 2009, 11:21 pm

aleclair wrote:
It feels that now, even what we'd call the "books" are all on the Interwebs. I'm referring here only to scholarly sources - not user-made content like Wikipedia. If I need a scholarly journal article for a paper, we have a million billion databases at my university that I can do a full-text search in. Likewise for things like the OED: I can just get that online if I am on campus.



Yeah, I try to use scholarly databases first if I need 'legit' sources to backup ideas in a paper. Sometimes that works great, sometime not, depending on the subject.

For quick, dirty definitions you can't beat answers.com!

Real books are nice, but who has time for them anymore?


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