Rating: 
Summary: A great undergraduate book (I used it thouroughly)
Review: First, I would like to say that this book IS: thourough enough for undergrads, extremely well written, contains good problems and is excellent preparation for grad-level courses.
Next, I would like to say that I don't think that reviewers who complain about this book have spent much time studying it. To the reviewers that complain that the text is not advanced enough I would say that the book is intended as an undergraduate text. If you know it well, you will prepared for a more advanced text like sakuri, messiah, etc(if jumping into these texts without a prior introduction is suitable for you, well then enjoy MIT.) I found this book to be very easy to read, contained great problems and gave me an excellent preparation for graduate QM. If I have any complaints about the text it would be that more dirac notation isn't used. However, the book contains eliciting questions and most importantly it teaches you QM.
I originally took a one semester undergrad class in QM and used a text by Gasiorowitz (I definately don't reccomend it.) The summer before Graduate school I was aware that I knew almost nothing of QM and I had liked Griffith's EM book, so I thought I would try his QM. I studied Griffiths text independently for the two summer months. I read chapters 1-8 and portions of later chapters. I also completed all of his starred problems in chapters 1-4 and many of the starred problems from chapters 5-8.
Using Griffiths text was one of the best decisions I have made in learning physics. I was very well prepared for my graduate QM classes. I would like to commend David Griffiths for his book. His writing style makes physics accessible by studying on your own. Not too many other authors of physics can do this.
Rating:
Summary: Quick, to the point, useful.
Review: I didn't use this book undergraduate quantum, I used Saxon. And for graduate I used Merzbacher and also Cohen-Tenoudji. But now I'm preparing myself for the qualifier, and I've found that I've put aside all of my quantum mechanics books and I'm using this one. (I've also put aside all of my E&M books and I'm using Griffith's book for that part of the Quali too.) This book obviously doesn't have the depth of a lot of other quantum books, and it isn't designed to. I gets you into the subject, shows you what you need to know and moves you along to the next subject. But what makes the book excellent is a simple "rating" system that Griffith uses. He puts one star next to problems that are fundamental importance yet won't take hours to work through. This is valuable for review. If you're using this book for review, I also think that having a solutions manual for the problems to check your work is useful, you can pick them up on ebay. Griffith makes books for people like me, non-genius students educated in U.S. public schools. We don't want to be bored while we're learning. He keeps things interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good
Review: I liked Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics a great deal. I liked his Electrodynamics book too. What I like most about Griffiths is that if something is important he will say so, if something is difficult he will say so, if something confounds everyone who sees it he will say so. Many other authors in physics pretend to be computers, and leave any intuition or feeling about the material they introduce entirely to the reader to learn for himself. We are not computers, we all understand things in very human ways, although I think the proud like to pretend everything is obvious to them and that personal comments such as Griffiths provides just insults their prodigous intelligence.
The only problem I have with the book is that the shmucks didn't put a single answer in there. That's why I didn't give it 5 stars. How are you supposed to learn it if you don't know where you might have gone wrong in your answers?
Rating:
Summary: The spark
Review: I read all sorts of math and physics books. I majored in math and like to keep the math parts of my brain working, even though my on-the-job application of mathematics consists of the operators +-/* Griffiths book is a gem for a person like me. I have been able to work through the entire thing by myself and I believe this has a lot to do with his style. He leaves out enough steps that you find yourself making marginal annotations that make you feel as if you're part of the whole learning process. He uses foreshadowing beautifully, to the point where I found that I was "like a kid at Christmas," picking at the corners of the wrapped presents under the tree: I researched, bought other books, surfed the web, heck - I even found myself in Berkeley's Physics Library!
If you want a dry, poorly written and edited tome, by all means, buy Sakurai (yes, I've read it, too). But if you want a book that either answers all the fundamental QM questions, keeps you interested and engaged, and - perhaps most important of all - sparks your curiosity to drive your research forward, then this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Great Intro to Quantum
Review: I took Quantum as an undergrad and used Gasiorowicz's 3rd Ed. I didn't learn much that was useful and I absolutely didn't gain any kind of physical insight. As a new grad student of Physics, I decided that I needed to take Quantum again. Luckily, we used Griffiths' Intro to Quantum. It was a wonderful experience. He builds the subject slowly and he gives phisical interpretations at every step.
This is a great text. Don't believe the 'nay-sayers'. This text is as useful as Griffiths' E&M text. The problems can be difficult, but they are labeled by difficulty. If you start off by working the simple problems, you will be able to solve all but the most difficult. The most important thing to remember is that the professor only assigns a minimum of homework problems. Many more problems should be solved to really understand the subject.
All in all, opinions here are immaterial. If you are reading this, it's becuase you have to use this text for a class. So,
Good luck!
Rating: 
Summary: Lacking substance
Review: I used this text book for my undergraduate quantum mechanics class. In that class, we covered basically everything in Griffiths. I have since gone on to graduate school. I have found myself very well prepared and I still use Griffiths as a reference because it explains basic ideas and basic problems better than most other text books. More importantly, it provided me with a good foundation for further study.This text book is a great introductory text book. It is a text book for students for whom quantum mechanics is a new subject. It is not a text book for people who already know any significant amount of quantum mechanics, nor is it a great text to use for independent study (unless you work the problems and have some way of checking yourself.) Shankar is too advanced for most students new to the subject. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. The only school I know of which uses it is Yale, and they count on students having a stronger background than most students at most schools have. Moreover, I know from personal experience that teachers at Yale focus on getting students to calculate the right answer rather than developing a solid understanding of the ideas behind the physics. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. Griffiths is designed such that it can be used for the quantum mechanics classes at most universities -- ie, if students haven't had every other physics class before they use this book or if some of their background is a little weak, they aren't screwed. This may not agree with some people's notions of how physics should be taught, but the reality is that you can't teach every physics class as if the students had already mastered every subject except that one. This is the reality at most universities. The fact that this book is accessible does not make it bad. Physics is a wonderful, beautiful subject and we're being really stupid if we judge how "advanced" a book is by how difficult it is to understand. This is a suicidal attitude for our field. I've been reading physics books for a long time, and most of the ones which are difficult to read are difficult because they're not well written, not because the material is inherently difficult. This book also cannot compensate for its misuse or for bad teaching. When I took the class, the teacher assigned some of the basic problems and some of the difficult problems. That way we made sure we knew the basics before we moved on to the difficult problems. If you're only doing the simple problems, it's your fault you're not getting anything out of it. If you're only doing the computationally difficult problems, you're missing some beautiful, simple examples. The physics is neither more real nor more important if it takes you a day to calculate rather than ten minutes. This is a problem-centered book, but honestly, that's the way most of us learn. We don't remember things we read as well as we remember things we do. Similarly, new notation is not introduced until later because ideas are being developed first. Introducing too many things at once does not facilitate learning, only frustration. I suggest the people who think they already understand all of the ideas consider what Feynmann said -- "Nobody really understands quantum mechanics." If you want answers, look them up. If you want to learn, use this book.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent introductory text book if you want to learn
Review: I used this text book for my undergraduate quantum mechanics class. In that class, we covered basically everything in Griffiths. I have since gone on to graduate school. I have found myself very well prepared and I still use Griffiths as a reference because it explains basic ideas and basic problems better than most other text books. More importantly, it provided me with a good foundation for further study. This text book is a great introductory text book. It is a text book for students for whom quantum mechanics is a new subject. It is not a text book for people who already know any significant amount of quantum mechanics, nor is it a great text to use for independent study (unless you work the problems and have some way of checking yourself.) Shankar is too advanced for most students new to the subject. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. The only school I know of which uses it is Yale, and they count on students having a stronger background than most students at most schools have. Moreover, I know from personal experience that teachers at Yale focus on getting students to calculate the right answer rather than developing a solid understanding of the ideas behind the physics. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. Griffiths is designed such that it can be used for the quantum mechanics classes at most universities -- ie, if students haven't had every other physics class before they use this book or if some of their background is a little weak, they aren't screwed. This may not agree with some people's notions of how physics should be taught, but the reality is that you can't teach every physics class as if the students had already mastered every subject except that one. This is the reality at most universities. The fact that this book is accessible does not make it bad. Physics is a wonderful, beautiful subject and we're being really stupid if we judge how "advanced" a book is by how difficult it is to understand. This is a suicidal attitude for our field. I've been reading physics books for a long time, and most of the ones which are difficult to read are difficult because they're not well written, not because the material is inherently difficult. This book also cannot compensate for its misuse or for bad teaching. When I took the class, the teacher assigned some of the basic problems and some of the difficult problems. That way we made sure we knew the basics before we moved on to the difficult problems. If you're only doing the simple problems, it's your fault you're not getting anything out of it. If you're only doing the computationally difficult problems, you're missing some beautiful, simple examples. The physics is neither more real nor more important if it takes you a day to calculate rather than ten minutes. This is a problem-centered book, but honestly, that's the way most of us learn. We don't remember things we read as well as we remember things we do. Similarly, new notation is not introduced until later because ideas are being developed first. Introducing too many things at once does not facilitate learning, only frustration. I suggest the people who think they already understand all of the ideas consider what Feynmann said -- "Nobody really understands quantum mechanics." If you want answers, look them up. If you want to learn, use this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A terrible book with terrible price
Review: If you take this class, you will find that every week you are being assigned for certaion problems, and next week, the proffessor will cut and past and scan solutions from the solution manual to the course web site, and their job is done. Book Sellers! Stop giving free solutions to professors!! you guys make american undergraduate student being less trained and less prepared for graduate school. lower the price and start sell solutions. the difference is smart student will know how to use them wisely, dumb ones will just copy them. I really want to see if the professors who teach the class can figure out those problems by themselves. and the one who need the solutions is the student.
Rating: 
Summary: ok
Review: The cat on the cover is amusing but the book itself is not that great. THe subject is incredibly difficult. THe treatment i'd say is average
Rating:
Summary: Perfect companion to more difficult texts
Review: This introductory text by Griffiths has two major advantages: first it is exceedingly interesting to read, at such an extent one could believe the material is easy. Exercises are challenging enough to show it is just an impression. Second, the text covers a rather big amount of the (non-relativistic) theory, in a concision which is exemplar. It is a short text, which travels in the corners of the field: quantum statistics, solid state physics, perturbation theories, scattering... Of course the counterpart is those topics aren't dealt with at depth. This is a book to see things, before to work on them. For all those reasons, it is a very, very bad reference, but it is not its purpose. For example, the bra and ket formalism is introduced a bit lately, and its use is not stressed. The functional notation for what is currently referred to as |n, l, m> conceals the power of Dirac notations. Tensor product of Hilbert space are completely omitted, thus obscuring the (short but important) section on angular momenta, especially their addition. However, following the book's spirit, you have an opportunity to see Clebsch-Gordan coefficients at work, with their pretty cascading tables. The book is accessible without serious prerequisites, not even in electromagnetism, you just need to know the basis of calculus. Therefore it is the text to get if as a beginner you want to get acquainted with this fundamental piece of physics, along with learning your first physical theories (mechanics or electromagnetism). For others, it is useless to they who ever know pretty much of the theory, even as a review. To students who encounter this strange world for the first time, but with a fierce amount of classical knowledge on their back, I recommend it either as a companion to a more demanding detailed text--Shankar seeming the perfect pick--or as the only text if tremendous amount of personal work is to be furnished to fill in and explore by oneself what is missing. I wouldn't rely too much on it however.
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