Reddit reviews Principles of Macroeconomics (Available Titles CourseMate)

My two favorite books which introduce economic thinking are Armchair Economist and The Undercover Economist. They're quick reads, they're jargon free, and actually teach some of the thinking. Unlike the pop-econ books (Freakonomics and its ilk), which are simply about strange results from research (some of Landsburg's later books suffer from this problem). For an introduction to behavioral economics, you can't do better than Predictably Irrational.

For substance, textbooks are probably best unless you have a carefully chosen list of academic articles. Wooldridge for Econometrics, Mankiw for introductory macro, and Nicholson for introductory micro (Krugman's micro book is fine too). Mankiw writes my favorite econ textbooks. For game theory, I used an older version of Watson's textbook, and it was fine, but I don't know how other game theory books stack up.

If textbooks are a bit much, but you still want a substantive book, the first chapter of Thomas Sowell's introduction is very good, the rest is decent repetition. If you want a some discussion of discredited economic theories that are still trotted out regularly (like trickle down), Zombie Economics is a really fun read.

How comfortable are you with reading a textbook for the fun of it?

While people will argue about his policy proposals and career history, Greg Mankiw writes one mean introductory text on economics. It's well-written, thorough and pretty easy to read, as far as textbooks go. It's a Macro book though so I would suggest making sure you know your Micro fundamentals, but you would probably be fine without it.

EDIT: If anyone is interested, he's also got a semi-decent blog, if a bit sparse in his postings.

You should find older students or see if you can rent them.
Chegg is a good resource as well.

That calc book is somewhat old so you can probably find it used for cheap, and the principles of macro is supa old as well.

This is the previous edition: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B002WLQ9JQ/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all

You can probably get problems from the prof.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0324589999/sr=8-1/qid=1347336913/ref=olp_pg_used?ie=UTF8&colid=&coliid=&condition=used&me=&qid=1347336913&seller=&sr=8-1&startIndex=0

Something doesn't add up here.

Here is the syllabus for Cornell's Econ 302 macro course

It says they use Greg Mankiw's book (which is pretty standard) and it covers all of the topics I mentioned in the GP in great depth (table of contents here). But no one covers that whole book in a semester though because it is like 600 pages. Krugman/Well's macro book is also good about covering fiscal and monetary policy in detail in chapters 12 and 13. For example, figure 12-10 in this book shows the debt/GDP ratios of various countries. As I said, these are basic concepts.

Also, I should point out that much of what I learned about macro I learned by reading the textbooks almost in full (I'm a nerd like that) and then non-textbook books (and blogs for the modern guys) from various people like Keynes, Samuelson, Friedman, Mankiw, Krugman, Stiglitz, Simon Johnson, De Long, Akerlof, etc. There is only so much time in class (and I was not an econ major, so I didn't get the upper level stuff).

But, back to the point, nothing I've said in this thread deviates from standard macro. The current US public debt/GDP ratio isn't that high historically and relative to other modern first-world economies (Japan, France, Germany, UK, Canada, Italy, etc.).