Modern Quantum Mechanics (2nd Edition)

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Summary: Very good book for postgraduates
Review: This book serves as a very good introduction to advanced quantum mechanics course. It contains standard contents and some new developements such as Bell's Inequality, Aharonov-Bohm effect etc. All of these are well presented. The book is concise but still contains enough details. Anyone having this book will love it!!

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Summary: beatiful second book on quantum mechanics
Review: This is a theoretical-minded graduate text on quantum mechanics, stressing the algebraic aspects of the theory. Those interested in applications should look elsewhere, though many applications are covered, but in a formal style. The presentation is lucid, in a relatively advanced tone in comparison with other books, say, Shankar

Rating:
Summary: fine text. best i've run accross.
Review: This is an excellent text for a graduate level course. I would first use something like griffiths to get over the initial shock of what quantum mechanics means and how to use it. Make sure you've had a little Dirac notation before you hit the book. But Sakurai will take it from there. The book is physically insightful, has well thought out problems, and incredibly clear explanations.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book on QM
Review: This is simply a wonderful book. It is well written and very clear. The introduction to the Dirac notation is nicely done and the rest of the book falls in place. QM is not an easy subject but I think this book makes more understandable.

Rating:
Summary: best book for graduate QM course
Review: This is the best book for first graduate QM course. Why? I think the reason is that it is written completely with bra and ket notation. Sakurai starts with the introduction of why bra and ket are invented in order to describe QM phenomena. It inherits essential of Dirac's QM and Feynmann's undergraduate series Vol.3 (QM) and extends It with a modern view. The readable volume is also a merit. strongly recommended!

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Summary: Great for three chapters...
Review: This is the best grad quantum book I have read so far. The first three chapters (Fundamental Concepts, Quantum Dynamics, and Angular Momentum) of the book are wonderfully done. These chapters, I believe, were completed by Sakurai before his untimely passing. The rest of the book seems to lack Sakurai's clarity but it does an adequate job tackling this difficult subject. Whether the lack of clarity is due to the increasing difficulty of the subject matter or the fact Sakurai didn't write it is unclear to me. After going through the whole book I only disliked the presentation of chapters four and six (Symmetry and Identical particles). These chapters were less mathematical and were more theoretical and could have used Sakurai's magic touch. The book was a great resource for a grad quantum class.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books on QM
Review: Well, I've read all of this book some years ago and, at that time (while learning for my QM I and QM II exams) I used this book together with L.D.Landau (non relativistic QM), W.Greiner (vol. I, II and some of III), F. Schwabl (QM) and the everused R.Shankar (QM). In the following years I went on using J.Sakurai several times as a reference. Today, I think that J.Sakurai book is one of the best choices for learning QM: his treatment of spin theory in QM is still one of the best (probably the best!). Just the last 2 chapters seem to me a bit uneven compared to the rest of the book. I must also say: if you have to learn QM, then you'll have to use Sakurai together with another book that tells you something more about the introductory part of QM (ondulatory mechanics and so on: for example, a good choice would be M.Born, Gasiorowicz, Greiner vol. I, or Schwabl), but J.Sakurai and L.D.Landau are, in my opinion, probably still the best textbooks on the core part of QM.

Rating:
Summary: Very good, when supplemented
Review: While teaching qm in the seventies and eighties I preferred Baym. A few years ago I decided on Sakurai and did not regret it. It's necessary to supplement the text with many derivations and details, but this book provides an excellent approach to qm in the spirit of Dirac, and provides a very good takeoff point for discussing the famous measurement problem (was there necessary to enlarge the discussion presented in Sakurai). I motivated the transition to qm by using Heisenberg's The Physical Principles of Quantum theory, where he explains how he was motivated in spirit by relativity theory to give up the idea of predictability of simultaneity of position and momentum. I ended the course by going to the literature and working through EPR and an introduction to quantum computation. A severe weakness: Sakurai assumes that the reader has learned elsewhere about the qm of the hydrogen atom!