<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Topical, but lots of typos
Review: I used this as my textbook when teaching a graduate course on the interstellar medium. It has good explanations of a lot of current material, and includes some very detailed derivations for the advanced or interested reader. However, a lot of the basics are glossed over or not clearly explained - this book really needs to go hand in hand with Spitzer's "Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium" to provide a complete picture. In any case, the big problem with this book is the ridiculous number of errors and typos (I and my students found over 100). This would just be annoying if all these errors were minor things like spelling mistakes. However, many of the errors are catastrophic, e.g. explaining spectroscopic notation but getting the labels all wrong, errors in the derivation of atomic levels, a calculation of cooling timescales which is wrong by a factor of 10^5, etc etc. This proved a very frustrating experience for me and for my students. Unless a second edition comes out with all these mistakes corrected, next time I will likely use this book for reference, but not recommend it to the students, so as to spare them this pain.
Rating: 
Summary: Another terrible book, like Osterbrock
Review: This is another of the books I had to use for my graduate ISM course. I dont know what the problem is, but every book Ive read on the ISM was terrible at explaining things (because confusion in this subject is very easy), and none of them have an INDEX thats worth a crap. So dont expect to be able to do the homework problems in there.Dopita is written a little better than Osterbrock, and there isnt the ridiculous amount of tables strewn within the text, but its not MUCH better.
<< 1 >>
| 
