Rating: 
Summary: A First Course in General Relativity
Review: Schutz's book, "A First Course in General Relativity", along with J. Foster's/ J.D. Nightingale's book, "A Short Course in General Relativity", are the ones to study prior to tackling the massive (sorry about the pun) Gravitation, by MTW. The logical arrangement of relativity is much better in these books than in MTW, although MTW treats more matters more thoroughly (can't help the puns). Schutz seems more like a physicist, and Foster/Night. seem more like mathemeticians. Both viewpoints help substantially! If I were only to get one of these books, I would get Schutz's first. Then get the Foster/Night. one. For example, F/N have a better treatment of the dual basis! However, only MTW treat the convenenient non-coordinate othornormal basis!
Rating: 
Summary: Solid start but you'll need Ohanian/wald
Review: This a very readable book that covers a lot of topics nicely. It gives a solid introduction to many of the main topics in the field. The only complaint I have is that it doesn't cover enough material.
My advice if you want a complete understanding of the field is to buy this and the Ohanian text (which is very thorough, pleasantly readable and does covering just about everything you need). Read them side by side and once that is done move on to Wald. Don't bother with MTW, its is a tome of scattered bits and pieces that work as a reference but it is NOT something from which you want to learn the subject.
Rating:
Summary: Accessible Introduction To General Relativity
Review: This book is a very good introduction to the basics of General Relativity. The approach taken to curvature is very clear, concentrating on plane polar co-ordinates to begin with and lots of concrete examples.The degree of abstraction is gradually increased from chapters 2 through to 5.It is great for independent study. Having mastered these preliminaries the reader is well equipped to deal with the formalism of Einstein's GR that follows.Someone with a limited mathematical background should find it o.k. I worked through much of this at the same time as studying Foster and Nightingale's 'Short Course in G.R. as well as Schutz's 'Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics'. The combination of these three is great preparation for more weighty tomes such as Misner Thorne And Wheeled.Postscript 2002: This would be a good book to study alongside Taylor's 'Blackholes - an introduction to GR' which is real good fun and deals with applications of spacetime metrics without the formalism of deriving/using the field equations.
Rating:
Summary: Good intro for dilettante
Review: This book is aimed at an undergraduate/first-year graduate
level, but doesn't "pull any punches" mathematically.
I thought he pulled it off. The book was accessible to
a non-physicist like me, while satisfying my urge to go
well beyond the Scientific American level of popular
science books.
Rating:
Summary: A Superb Book
Review: This book is the one text I'd give to someone who aspires to learn the mathematics of general relativity. Aimed at a reader who has a grasp of three-d vector calculus and a firm basis in special relativity, this book is an ideal bridge between a text like French's "Special Relativity" and the Big Book--Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's "Gravitation." Schutz says that his book should prepare a reader to move confidently into texts like MTW, and I think he's spot on. I'd put Rindler's "Essential Relativity" at a slightly lower level than this text. Rindler demands less of the reader going in, and probably gives more in the way of conceptual intuition regarding black holes and modern cosmological models, but Rindler doesn't leave the reader with the mathmatical understanding that Schutz does. One could stop after Rindler with a sense of having learned some things--one ends Schutz with a sense of being prepared to learn a lot more.The first chapters refreshes the reader's mind about SR, and then proceeds to build tensor analysis in SR. What makes this book stand out it uses the language is that of modern GR--one learns the language of one-forms and vectors, not co- and contravariant vectors. Cultivating a geometrical intuition about these strange new objects (a la MTW) is given equal or greater weight than developing skills at index manipulation. Those are two reasons I'd recommend this book over Foster and Nightingale, for example. For me personally, Schutz's path toward the mathematics of curvature beginning with Cartesian and polar coordinates in 2d was easier to follow than any treatment I've seen. Once the mathematical structure (which is the book's core) has been laid out, the physics that follows is a bit different than most texts: slightly curved spacetimes, then the field equations, and then chapters on gravitational radiation and stellar theory. I liked that. Gravitational waves are a sexy topic and an area of lively research, so putting the chapter where it is left me feeling that I'd really accomplished someting by getting that far, and had caught at least a glimpse of the frontier. The last two chapters--Schwarzchild spacetime and cosmology--are still good, but also more abbreviated; one can't fit everything in. (MTW clearly tried, and although it's the book I'd have on a desert island if I had only one GR book there, Schutz has a big edge over MTW in being portable.) This book has a good selection of problems, with brief hints and answers. It's excellent for self study--I think actually having it as a course material with a teacher would be rapture.
Rating: 
Summary: OK, but not the best
Review: This book was OK, but I wouldn't recommend buying it. You'll get a much better understanding of the topic by reading THE book on the subject, Gravitation, by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. There's no reason to read Schutz as an intermediary before reading MTW, because you can instead read MTW's "track 1" selection of topics. MTW's track 1 covers about the same range of topics as Schutz, and is about the same difficulty level as Schutz, but MTW explains things more clearly.
Rating:
Summary: Good, good, good for passing exams!
Review: This is an introductory book for GR. I read this book two years ago for preparing an exam about GR, while I did never learn anything related to GR before but I passed the exam very well after reading this book. This book doesn't describe GR with the most modern math languages, but who cares if you just wanna learn the ideas of GR, actually this makes the understanding easier. No more preliminary knowledge than college physics is needed for reading this book, even the simple differental geometry has been self-contained very well in this small book. I consider this book a model for all good physics books.
Rating:
Summary: A very good introductory book
Review: This was the first book i read as an introduction to general relativity.The physical insights are truly great and the mathematics are presented in an easy to follow way needing only very few requirements.
Im writing this rewiew nevertheless to explain why i rate it with 4 stars rather than five.The preblem i believe this book has is with the philosophy that tensor calculus is analyzed.
The author begins with proving tensor calculus equation in a way that is valid ONLY for special relativity,then proceeds with the analysis of tensor calculus for the 2-d eucledian space,and again the equations are valid ONLY for the given space.
In the end the author generalises the tensor equations for any spacetime using the Equivalence Principle,and not a solid mathematical proof,whitch Ifound confusing.
As a result i give the book 4 stars because of the lack of a truly solid mathematical analysis of the manifold thery.Nevertheless its a great book for a beginner.
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