<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Good Relativity Book
Review: Of several of the books covering relativity theory and general
relativity in particular, this book is one of the best. I
consult it frequently. Benefits from buying this book: There are
numerous illustrations, the concepts are explained well, and
the organization of the material is good. Disadvantages: there
are no worked examples. I hope that one day that Schaums comes
out with a general relativity text in its "Outline Series" be-
cause worked examples are scarce in just about every general
relativity text. Since there is a Schaums outline on Tensor
calculus, I would recommend working on at least the first 8
chapters of that book before buying D'Invernos text. Tensor
calculus is a key to understanding general relativity, and there
is no better way to learn the subject than from David Kays
Schaum Outline on tensor calculus.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to Einstein's masterpiece
Review: Ray D'Inverno has introduced the topic in smooth logical manner. Basics such as K-Calculus are clearly written, furthermore there are answers to problems at the back of the books which are very helpful for beginners (not many books have this!), a lot of reference to other publications (excellent supplementary reading) are also supplied by the author. The only topic that need to be improved is on the tensor calculus section. Anyway this is worth buying.
Rating: 
Summary: By far the best introductory text
Review: There are far too many books written on relativity, black holes and cosmology. Of these books, the best (e.g. Hawking and Ellis, Wald, Stewart) can be studied with minimal prerequisites and you should walk away with a good grasp of the issues, problems and results. However if you want to have more than a coffee shop knowledge of relativity you should begin with something that provides examples and problems you can churn out yourself. D'Inverno provides these. He puts down no result that you can't check for yourself with nothing more than basic calculus and some intuition. From this book you can then, after perhaps studying something beyond basic calculus, fruitfully study the above classics.
Rating: 
Summary: An OK introductory book
Review: This book is very clear in explaining basic concepts and computational details. On the other hand, the book lacks mathematical beauty, all the exercises are trivial computation, check this and check that. It is disappointing that the book doesn't include many interesting topics, such as black hole thermodynamics, Hawking radiation, etc.
Rating:
Summary: THE book that will get you started with General Relativity
Review: This is about the best introduction to General Relativity that
I've ever seen. It introduces just (and very clearly) all
the mathematical tools you need, clearly puts the basis of the
theory in the exposed formalism (tensor calculus) and then
applies it to quite a lot of interesting physical problems.
After a few missed starts, it was the book that really got me
into General Relativity ; once you've gone through it you wonder
why you were having difficulties before.
Rating:
Summary: THE book that will get you started with General Relativity
Review: This is about the best introduction to General Relativity that
I've ever seen. It introduces just (and very clearly) all
the mathematical tools you need, clearly puts the basis of the
theory in the exposed formalism (tensor calculus) and then
applies it to quite a lot of interesting physical problems.
After a few missed starts, it was the book that really got me
into General Relativity ; once you've gone through it you wonder
why you were having difficulties before.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent and Comprehensive Introduction
Review: This is an excellent introduction to general relativity and related topics. The best thing about this book is the very easy presentation of basic differential geometry used in the theory, and the large number of problems and solutions at the end of each chapter. The book is self-contained and very readable. I advise any beginner in this subject to start with this book.
Rating:
Summary: The best intro book on GR !!!
Review: This is without any doubt the best book one can use for starting with GR: it is self contained, well written and moreover it is full of Physical insight. In brief: a great book. Even the introductory mathematical part (about tensor calculus) is great written: not too short and not too long. If one would like to gain an additional point of view about tensor calculus I'd recommend to compare the way followed by R. d'Inverno with that followed by Richtmyer "Principles of advanced mathematical Physics" vol 2 (the last all done in geodesic coordinates: this is a book on maths and not about GR!!). The level of Ray d'Inverno is at advanced undergraduate/1st year graduate: in fact one can find a lot of well discussed topics that are generally left out in other books on the subject. Of course this is not an advanced text like R. Wald or Hawking-Ellis, which are the right books if one wants to get a deeper insight in particular topics. The only fundamental thing R. d'Inverno lacks to treat in a fully way is the form of the Energy of the Gravitational field in GR and its related problems: no specific discussion about it. I think this is an important topic. A valuable (and probably the best) discussion about the latter can be found in L.D.Landau "Field Theory" book, or even in Sean Carroll "Spacetime and Geometry" book (a very good one, my favourite together with Landau and Ray d'Inverno), or you can also have a look about it into P. Dirac or Weinberg.
<< 1 >>
| 
