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Summary: You will learn by solving exercises
Review: It is usually said that you won't learn much from a book of solved exercises, but the explanations in this book use the problem as an excuse to teach you the general theory, actually making you able to solve other problems different from the ones there. And you must recall that in this subject there is not a "simple and condensed" theory, but a varied, big and complex collection of theories, approaches and recipes.
For example, enjoy: the specific heat of a gas of particles with internal degrees of freedom (3.18, 3.19 and others), working out the Fermi and Bose statistics from the beginning (4.2, 4.3), vibration of a chain and of a crystal/Debye model (4.8-4.11), Bose-Einstein Condensation (4.12, 4.15), Ising problems (5.14 and following; 5.22 is a useful 2-dimensional Ising).Note for UBA students (Buenos Aires): this book is ideal for Fisica Teorica 3, specially for statistical ensembles (chap. 3), quantum statistics (chap. 4) and the topics that appear in chap. 5 (but for transport processes and Brownian motion you should also keep an eye on the theory's books - Huang and Reichl). Many of the exercises that appear in the practices are solved here, and this is your salvation if your teachers do not solve exercises in the blackboard (or if they are bad at it). You will not only pass the partial tests but actually learn things, specially subtle stuff that goes unnoticed in the theoretical classes, like realizing which are the quantum numbers involved and which are their values, or which is exactly the meaning of all the sum symbols that appear everywhere all the time.
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Summary: Great Solution Book for Stat Mech! Help is here!
Review: One of the biggest problems with Stat Mech, is that most folks I know (like me) don't have a good intuition for it. It's also one of those courses in which universities don't really hammer down, and have problems getting someone to teach it well, if at all. As painful as it might be, this book can help the graduate as well as the undergraduate student. Other books have LOTS of solutions (Garrod's and Kubo's come into mind), but it's this book, by Dalvit et al, actually explains, in some detail, the justifications for the steps in the solutions. Many instructors may not want you to use this book (it's tempting not to 'learn' when you can copy), but this book can actually compliment your learning of the material. A must for those having problems in Stat Mech, self-learners and beginners in this area.
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