Hey guys,

I will be starting my first semester as a nursing student in the Spring 2013. For my Fundamentals class I have these 3 books that I can't really decide whether to buy or rent them. Any help would be great, thanks.

1) Nursing Diagnosis Handbook (9th Ed.) by Mosby, Elsevier.

2) Fundamentals Success: A Q&A Review Applying Critical Thinking to Test Taking (3rd Ed.) by Davis.

3) Mosby's Drug Guide for Nurses, with 2012 update (9th Ed.)

I would buy all of them. Especially the test success,it's a great book and I would start looking at it now! There are a few chapters of how to take tests. :)

You should definitely buy your books. In my program I used the Nursing Diagnosis Handbook and the Drug Guide for more than one semester. Good luck!

Trust me, you'll be buying books all your professional life. This is not like high school when you finish, oh, American History and you can ditch the book. Everything you learn in nursing school (including the prereqs) will be required elements in your next coursework, and you will be expected to remember and use it.

As a matter of fact, here's your first book that your faculty forgot to put on the reading list: NANDA-I 2012-2014. It is THE definitive resource on nursing diagnosis, how to think about it, and how to really use it in nursing. Free two-day delivery from Amazon for students, and you can thank me at the end of the semester.

Buy them all. I actually have book 1 and 3 on your list and I have used them for fundamentals, med/surg and psych. The NURSING DIAGNOSIS book will become your favorite. That will be what you use for your Nandas when it comes to careplans.

Definitely you will keep using your drug guide, and if you like that particular diagnostic handbook I would buy it as well. A lot of students seem to want to hang onto their fundamentals books, but I'm more prone to be sure to hang onto the reference type books. (You are forever after responsible for the fundamentals info though, so if you need the book for that then you'll need to keep it).

Perhaps at some point I will use some of the additional cds that we bought with some of the books. So far though, we only signed up for one online and we barely used it (aside from ATI, we use that quite a bit).

Also, I like some of the books better than others. For instance, we had a diagnostics reference book from Kee last semester, but this coming semester the new students were given what i consider to be a better diagnostic and lab reference book (Mosbys). So I got the new one also and will prob just sell the other.

Truly, looking at your book list, I think I'd prob like the Mosby's drug guide book you will be buying better than the one we got last semester (by someone else).

I also really like the looks of that NANDA book that GrnTea recommended and I'm not all that thrilled with the one we bought last semester. So it looks like I'll be ordering NANDA I 2012 - 2014.

You really DO want to have a great reference for your NANDAs. Writing care plans seems to be one of the more difficult things to learn, particularly if you aren't comfortable with your resources.

Also, its hard to tell you which books you are going to like the best and use the most because everyone is different and its one of those things where you don't know exactly what you need until you experience it. Then you're like, "Oh, I wish I had a book that does thus and such."

Also, I take practically all of my books to campus every day (in a big case on wheels). There is nothing worse than being there with a bunch of downtime for some reason or having been given a project, and not having the info I need to get work done.

Also, sometimes you can get the same books used on amazon and save a good deal of money. It can be cheaper than renting in some cases. (Just make certain you have the correct ISB #'s)

It seems like you'd end up re-renting those books over and over again, so I'm not sure your actually save any money that way. Über important stuff!

I'd go ahead and buy them. I didn't have the drug guide for last semester and found that Google could answer the few questions I had about medications (pharm starts next semester and we weren't expected to know the ins/outs of medications at that point), but honestly the Diagnosis Handbook and Fundamentals Success really helped my grades! The Diagnosis Handbook greatly improved my grades for my care plans and helped me to learn to think through them. Fundamentals Success included more information than we covered in my fundamentals course, but I would practice test questions after every chapter we covered and took tests before each test in class. I think it really helped to develop my critical thinking skills, and I loved that the rationales were provided if I missed a question. Again, that book included more topics than we covered in my actual class, so I anticipate using it again in the semesters to come.

Also, I did find both on Amazon/Ebay, which saved a lot of cash as opposed to buying them from a book store!

Try chegg, Barnes and noble, amazon, or eBay to buy at the cheapest price.

Buy, buy, buy. You will always need that drug guide, for one thing. And you'll probably flip back and forth through that nursing diagnosis book so many times you'd get penalized for turning it back in with ragged pages, lol. Don't buy new, though. So many good deals on amazon, and I got most of my textbooks from textbooksrus.com