Where do I find resources/textbooks for the level 3 extended diploma I am doing

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There are no specific textbooks written for the BTEC's as far as I know but there are other resources you can use, the website freestudy is really good for the maths units, we had to basically teach ourselves the maths from this site, and a few of our assignment questions were actually taken directly from it.
In all honesty you don't really need books, you get given your assignments and you simply research the questions there and then, all the information you need is on the internet, the only units that you may find a textbook useful for is the maths units.
Which engineering course are you doing? I did the mechanical.

google it, there might be a free PDF file online or a bookstore might be selling it (also ebay/amazon). If you hate taking notes in lectures why don't you use sit back and use the audio recorder on your phone.

There's a 'mechanical principals' unit, but te course title is Btec extended diploma. I'd rather have a course book though, seeing as I'm not sure what detail I have to know things I in. And if I miss something in lessons, that's it.

Also, for the health and safety unit there's supposed to be a 2 hour controlled assessment in. We had a mock the other day and I only got half the questions done. It asked some random questions like 'what are the key features of x regulation?' What the **** does it mean by 'key features'? It's giving me a head ache. All we've been told is to use the HSE website and legislation.com. I hate it

The health and safety is a headache but the longer you spend on it the more it becomes common sense. Like at the start when they show you a centre lathe and ask you about the hazards, control measures and regulations relating to it you are so confused but once you've used it for a while and the regulations slowly start to sink in, it genuinely does become common sense. If you want I can try to find my health and safety notes and send you them?

Also the mechanical principles unit is a math/physics unit, trust me when I say you will need the freestudy website for this, so many of the questions will be identical to ones on this site

Edit* I found my health and safety assignment, I got a Distinction in it but i haven't actually written out the questions, If you go down it it does give some useful information on control measures and regulations but mainly it could show you the detail you have to go into to obtain a distinction. If you want I could send you it?

This is a good idea, I don't know how many times I got distinctions in units purely because I had recorded the teachers lecture and was able to listen back and pick up on small hints they dropped.

BTEC's are taught so much differently to school, Instead of you sitting an externally written exam that has a mark scheme your own teachers write and mark the coursework. This means they know exactly what they are looking for and it may be very different to what a textbook tells you. If you can give the teachers back their own notes in your words, with some information you have researched yourself and sometimes your own conclusions, that is the easiest way to do well.

We had one teacher in particular who was very picky about what he accepted, if he had it in his head that he wanted a certain point mentioned, you could rewrite paragraphs from a textbook, but if you didn't have his point included you wouldn't get the marks. It was an absolute pain because you could argue with him all day that you wrote an adequate amount of correct, relevant information but he would just reply you didn't write what I was looking for.

That would be good, thanks. I'm not sure about how to use the HSE website and legislation.com as resources, that's all our teacher has told us to refer to, is them. I spent too much time trying to work out where to look for information I'd never seen before in the assessment. I can't be doing that in the real thing or I'll fail it. I need to know how to find the information quickly. If it were a matter of having to memorise the actual regulations then I'd do that but that's not what we were told to do. Our teacher tells us that we should use legislation.com for the verbatim regulations and HSE for explaination, so for instance I was typing in 'key features of x regulation' and it wasn't coming up with anything. I've never had to contend with looking for non-existent resources before. Is there H&S stuff on Freestudy?

Not sure if Btec is for me. It all seems a load of convoluted BS. Why do they make finding the information so unnecessarily difficult. Wtf? Grrrr

No Freestudy is for the maths and physics modules but it is amazing for it. with the health and safety stuff our teacher did provide us with a summarized form of each of the legislation, so it could be helpful if you spend time now writing up a summary of each one that will help you during your assessment?

We had to do about the COSHH and PUWER regulations too but maybe your is different, That's one issue with writing a book, BTEC teachers have more freedom than A level teachers, they choose what to assess, what modules to teach and they write their own coursework, If they covered every thing and all the modules the book would be extremely long and more than half of it would be irrelevant as you do a small amount of the modules (18 out of a possible 40 or something). But that's what I mean by just listen to your teachers, put down what they say, because at the end of the day they're the ones marking it and they often have their own idea of what they will and wont accept. Have you done any proper coursework pieces yet?

The health and safety is a headache but the longer you spend on it the more it becomes common sense. Like at the start when they show you a centre lathe and ask you about the hazards, control measures and regulations relating to it you are so confused but once you've used it for a while and the regulations slowly start to sink in, it genuinely does become common sense. If you want I can try to find my health and safety notes and send you them?

Also the mechanical principles unit is a math/physics unit, trust me when I say you will need the freestudy website for this, so many of the questions will be identical to ones on this site

Edit* I found my health and safety assignment, I got a Distinction in it but i haven't actually written out the questions, If you go down it it does give some useful information on control measures and regulations but mainly it could show you the detail you have to go into to obtain a distinction. If you want I could send you it?