Comment by justwanttorecommend on The Best Textbooks on Every Subject · 2016-08-07T10:32:31.981Z · LW · GW

For Biology 101, Life by David Sadava is amazing. I wasn't even particularly interested in the subject and just needed the course credit, but it was a fascinating page turner and made everything so clear.

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Science-Biology-David-Sadava/dp/1464141266

I don't know if this counts as a textbook, but Python for the Absolute Beginner is so good for beginning programming. Python is a great language to learn programming with. This book is just so perfectly paced. It's the exercises that make it work so well. It increments the difficulty just a smidgeon with each exercise to gradually get you used to more and more concepts.

https://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Absolute-Beginner-3rd/dp/B00B7RE628/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1470565643&sr=1-1&keywords=python+for+absolute+beginners#navbar