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Rating: 
Summary: Don`t Waste Your Money
Review: It`s very unfortunate that my teacher take this book as the textbook. After a semester I found this book awlful enough for the reason following, 1.It lacks example. 2.There is no answer for the problems. 3.There is no detailed calculational process. The author seemed omit all the processes and get the answer soon. If you are a student, don`t choose this book! alas! I want it to be 0 star but 1 star. It`s not worth rating.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible book - READ Goldstein's instead
Review: Terrible book, that's all I can say. I own both Goldstein's classical mechanics and this book. If you compare the logic, both books are quite similar. HOWEVER, just read both books, you will see that Hand and Finch are probably just trying to become famous by publishing this piece of junk. In the foreward, it is even mentioned that this book is developed from a set of lecture notes used in Cornell....YES IT'S JUST a collection of lecture notes ONLY. You will need a good teacher to explain things to you before you attempt this book at all. Now look at Goldstein, it IS a textbook. You can just learn classical mechanics from reading Goldstein even if you have a terrible teacher. Furthermore, Hand and Finch don't give examples at all, and there is NO ANSWERS to the short-quiz questions found in the chapters, which dont make sense at all! The reason I am giving it 2 stars instead of 1 is that the problems in the end of the textbook are challenging and good, and not many typos are found throughout the book. In conclusion, don't waste your money on this, and if your instructor is using this book... God bless you!
Other books I recommend: Marion/Thorton does quite a good job, but it is probably too elementary, considering the fact that Lagrangian formulation is introduced only towards the end of the book, which doesnt reflect the importance of this subject in theoretical physics. However you will find many good examples in Thorton's book. IT IS A GREAT BUY.
ONCE MORE, DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY IN HAND/FINCH!!
Rating: 
Summary: A Nice book to fill the gap !!
Review: This book is excellent to fill the gap between basic physics (such as: Halliday-Resnick, etc.) and advanced classical mechanics (such as: Goldstein or Arnold).The discussion is clear and expressed in plain English. The problems are both challanging and informative. In my opinion, this text is better than Symon's "MECHANICS"
and should be in your shelf right next to Goldstein's. This text can also be used to accompany Marion-Thornton's "CLASSICAL DYNAMICS".
Rating:
Summary: fantastic book
Review: This is a fabulous book! It is written at a very advanced level, however, which is why some of the others reviewing this book failed to see its strengths. If you are taking a second course in mechanics, and you are past the stage where you need to have your hand held throughout an entire course, then this book is ideal.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best
Review: This is a very good book for learning analytical mechanics.
As a student, I recieve the Mechanics by Florian Scheck, and I want to tell you that I couldn't understand a word. Mechanics by Florian Scheck is probably a good book but for me, it's not readable. So, I took Analytical Mechanics by Louis N. Hand and Janet Finch, a readable book, that actually tries to explain things in simple, clear words. It's also better than Landau's.
I've also enjoyed read from it other chapters that wasn't in my course's scope, something I never thought I'll do... Recommended!
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