I have to admit that I have often disagreed with others over what textbooks are best, but I think that's natural.<p>For one, you often start a field with a specific book. If you pour a lot of time into that book, you often feel more attached to it. Then, when trying to evaluate another textbook, it's hard (impossible?) to go through that same experience and understand if you would have had an easier time with the material. There are definitely some obvious cases, but it isn't always.<p>Second, sometimes people just have different learning styles and have a preference for them. Landau and Lifshitz has a reputation for being very hard (but rewarding!) to parse, and that is easily a showstopper for some people. Other books might only have relatively easy exercises (Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right, for example), which can help you gain a lot of confidence, while others might have many very difficult or very tedious problems. Some might have solutions to problems, some might not.<p>Really, I think the best we can do is put a list of "top books" for each subject rather than the "best textbooks" for each subject.