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NurseGirl525, ASN, RN
3,663 Posts
You will be expected to have all of the required books. If you are ordering from a site like Amazon or ebay make sure it is the current edition that your instructor wants. We had a bunch of people get old editions and the pages never matched up and it didn't have the most current information in them. Then they expected our instructors to look through old books and match up page numbers for them. It was frustrating because our paperwork specifically said buy the edition in the book list. I'm all for getting books cheaper. If I had the time I would scour the internet for cheaper pricing. I also know though what the bookstore sells is exactly what the instructors want. Your first semester will be your most expensive for buying books. Many books you will use throughout the program.
Do not try reading and learning these books before school starts. You won't understand the content. It will be like reading a foreign language to you. Just enjoy the rest of your summer. I am totally enjoying my time off. And you will run into books that you barely use. My med math book seemed like a waste of $150 to me. I really didn't need it to learn how to do dimensional analysis. I already had a handle on that. But the other books I have used. I didn't use the first semester but doing my care plan last semester all of my lab value books and Tabers came in handy.
If a Nursing Diagnosis book is on the list, take a look at it once school starts and you start working with them. I have this book with them in it, but it is terrible. Even my instructors say it's not real good and they mistakenly ordered the wrong one for us to buy. I ended up getting another one that was in my bookstore one day, and it was definitely worth the price, especially when doing my big care plan at the end of the semester. It saved me so much time and frustration looking things up. I say wait until you are working with the nursing diagnosis so you have an understanding how they work first of all, and then you need to find one that works with you. I know GrnTea suggests getting the one from Nanada that is the most current edition and I am going to purchase one of those before the program starts as well.
When I started Pharmacology I got a book called Pharmacology made incredibly easy. I really only looked at it a couple of times because I did not see it as helpful to me. The book was setting everything up in acronyms to help remember better, but the acronyms did not make sense at all. They would substitute Ks for Cs and sometimes pick an O out of a middle of a word. Or the word they picked did not relate. To me it made memorizing drug classes more difficult. I think that an acronym should be the first letter of each word that relates and don't substitute letters even if they sound the same because that also makes it harder to remember. I'm going to be thinking of a word that starts with K when I should really be thinking of one that starts with C. I'm sure it is helpful for some, but my mind doesn't work that way.
Good luck and have fun!!