Reddit mentions of Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry & eBook

My main hobby is reading textbooks, so I decided to go beyond the scope of the question posed. I took a look at what I have on my shelves in order to recommend particularly good or standard books that I think could characterize large portions of an undergraduate degree and perhaps the beginnings of a graduate degree in the main fields that interest me, plus some personal favorites.

Neuroscience: Theoretical Neuroscience is a good book for the field of that name, though it does require background knowledge in neuroscience (for which, as others mentioned, Kandel's text is excellent, not to mention that it alone can cover the majority of an undergraduate degree in neuroscience if corequisite classes such as biology and chemistry are momentarily ignored) and in differential equations. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology were used in my classes on cognition and learning/memory and I enjoyed both; though they tend to choose breadth over depth, all references are research papers and thus one can easily choose to go more in depth in any relevant topics by consulting these books' bibliographies.

General chemistry, organic chemistry/synthesis: I liked Linus Pauling's General Chemistry more than whatever my school gave us for general chemistry. I liked this undergraduate organic chemistry book, though I should say that I have little exposure to other organic chemistry books, and I found Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis to be very informative and useful. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to take instrumental/analytical/inorganic/physical chemistry and so have no idea what to recommend there.

Biochemistry: Lehninger is the standard text, though it's rather expensive. I have limited exposure here.

Mathematics: When I was younger (i.e. before having learned calculus), I found the four-volume The World of Mathematics great for introducing me to a lot of new concepts and branches of mathematics and for inspiring interest; I would strongly recommend this collection to anyone interested in mathematics and especially to people considering choosing to major in math as an undergrad. I found the trio of Spivak's Calculus (which Amazon says is now unfortunately out of print), Stewart's Calculus (standard text), and Kline's Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach to be a good combination of rigor, practical application, and physical intuition, respectively, for calculus. My school used Marsden and Hoffman's Elementary Classical Analysis for introductory analysis (which is the field that develops and proves the calculus taught in high school), but I liked Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis (nicknamed "Baby Rudin") better. I haven't worked my way though Munkres' Topology yet, but it's great so far and is often recommended as a standard beginning toplogy text. I haven't found books on differential equations or on linear algebra that I've really liked. I randomly came across Quine's Set Theory and its Logic, which I thought was an excellent introduction to set theory. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica is a very famous text, but I haven't gotten hold of a copy yet. Lang's Algebra is an excellent abstract algebra textbook, though it's rather sophisticated and I've gotten through only a small portion of it as I don't plan on getting a PhD in that subject.

Computer Science: For artificial intelligence and related areas, Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach's text is a standard and good text, and I also liked Introduction to Information Retrieval (which is available online by chapter and entirely). For processor design, I found Computer Organization and Design to be a good introduction. I don't have any recommendations for specific programming languages as I find self-teaching to be most important there, nor do I know of any data structures books that I found to be memorable (not that I've really looked, given the wealth of information online). Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is considered to be a gold standard text for algorithms, but I haven't secured a copy yet.

Physics: For basic undergraduate physics (mechanics, e&m, and a smattering of other subjects), I liked Fundamentals of Physics. I liked Rindler's Essential Relativity and Messiah's Quantum Mechanics much better than whatever books my school used. I appreciated the exposition and style of Rindler's text. I understand that some of the later chapters of Messiah's text are now obsolete, but the rest of the book is good enough for you to not need to reference many other books. I have little exposure to books on other areas of physics and am sure that there are many others in this subreddit that can give excellent recommendations.

Other: I liked Early Theories of the Universe to be good light historical reading. I also think that everyone should read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

I'm in a biochemistry major and my department uses Nelson's and Cox's Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry.

Trust me when I tell you that you're not alone in this predicament. I took a biochemistry class taught using a textbook by Lehninger. I'm not sure if you're familiar at all with biochemistry, but assuming you're not, let me just say that it's a REALLY REALLY hard and detailed science. The textbook is about 1200 pages. Alongside the book, we were tested on Darwin's Black Box. Every exam covered a tiny bit of biochemistry and 2-3 chapters of Black Box, pretty much the creationists' science text. The professor's rationale was that the biochemistry book was just one theory of how things work in the body; Black Box was just another. I'm all for hearing multiple theories about things, but NOT in biochemistry class taught in a biology department. I needed to learn significant amounts of biochemistry to continue my education, not alternative theories that could explain the origins of life. The scariest part about it was that this was a professor with a PhD in biology from a top school.

People talk a lot about how expensive private schools aren't worth the price you pay. However, in my experience, professors in top schools don't bullshit you with their highly irrelevant opinions in classes with tons and tons of science material. They present the material as science with testable hypotheses, often going into details about how certain processes were tested and verified. They don't bullshit with here's another irrelevant theory to how life may have developed; they instead go into the nuances of how proline residues in amino acids can disrupt secondary and tertiary protein structure.

Yes! That's the one

It's simultaneously the bane of my existence and the pique of my interest. It's really quite dangerous haha.

1st pass:
Get your hands on Brock or Prescott (standard microbio textbooks) and read the chapter on Archaea. These books are good if you want an overview of the group in general, but if you want something more specific, this isn't the book.

2nd pass:
Get your hands on Bergey's Manual of Systemic Bacteriology. My microbio professor who works on Archaea swore by this book. Depending on the edition, you will find notes on the various species and genera that are not only interesting but also help in their classification.

For general principles of protein folding and stability, I would recommend the following:

1. Voet and Voet
   
   
2. Petsko and Ringe
   
   
3. Lehninger