Alicornutopia

...do most university courses where you're from not have textbooks

I assume the book Cam found and the book that was distributed with Revelation were different, anyway, because the book he found was more notebook than textbook.

Yeah, textbooks, plural, typically not just one.

Anyway, my main question is still what information was there and what Cam had to rederive or rediscover.

It had pretty much all the technical info; Cam cleaned it up and added little notes but not enough to count as coauthoring it or anything.

I presume the university course had more practical experience, "let the experts check over your work" type stuff?

Yeah. Cam got to teach a course on the strength of having practice from pre-Revelation.

Presumably the university courses also had the other benefits of a professor, such as somebody who can say “don’t write the circle in Latin unless you know Latin fluently”

Oh wait, that benefit only comes with the good professors.

Would Cam have had to permanently injure anybody to exploit the loophole, or just (for example) interpolate a finger off in such a way that a different, better-bound demon could grow him a new one? It might have been worth it so his students didn’t learn to be overconfident in binding.

What happens if a summoner gives a Daeva a payment but the Daeva is not dismissed? How does "making life really unpleasant" interacts with bindings and to what extent?

There's nothing stopping you from paying a daeva and then keeping 'em.

Bindings gradually fall away from a daeva who has finished their task and not been paid.

Given some human in some world such that if they drew a circle it would work, and that world is not Revelation (i.e. usual thread premise, but specifically not one-off-fluke), can that human also do parlor tricks?