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Rating: 
Summary: An excellent introductory astronomy textbook
Review: I like this up-to-date textbook. I like the explanations, the diagrams, the marvellous photographs, the exercises. It covers pretty much everything I'd want as a teacher or student, and in well under 600 pages. Maybe the parts I liked best were the sections on relativity and cosmology. But it was all just great, as it sailed through telescopes, stars, spectra, binaries,the Sun, stellar evolution, the Milky Way, star formation, the interstellar medium, normal galaxies, active galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the Sun's planetary system. The treatment of the solar planetary system included planetary atmospheres, surfaces, and interiors. It even talked about planetary resonances.
One weakness, to my way of thinking, was the overly brief appendix on astronomical coordinates and timekeeping. And there were a couple of minor topics I would have wanted to see mentioned. One was Gamma Ray Bursters. Another was Blue Stragglers.
Rating: 
Summary: Generally good book with a few big flaws
Review: This book offers a good introduction to astronomy, with chapters devoted to everything from telescope technology to general relativity and cosmology. Its explanations are generally clear and instructive, although the sections on subjects like nuclear and particle physics could be a little overwhelming to the uninitiated - it's simply a lot of information to present in a relatively small amount of space, but the author does a decent job. The book gives a good understanding of the science aspect of astronomy, but rushes through some of the technicalities, with, for example, a surprisingly brief and uninformative section (3 pages!) on astronomical coordinates and timekeeping.
My big complaint about this book is that it is chock full of errors! Some entire diagrams need to be replaced, and more importantly, there are way too many errors in the equations and exercises. As a student with weekly problem sets to get through, I found this quite frustrating. In one case, an entire exercise was an error and had to be replaced with a different question. If you're thinking of using this book for a course, make sure you find the list of after press corrections, and hand it out on the first day of class.
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