Classical Mechanics

Rating:
Summary: Setting the Record Straight
Review: David Schaic's review isn't bad. However, it does have some problems, the chief one being verbosity. As for Taylor's book, I found little use for it as reading material. It does, however, have a very nice cover. And this is how I generally like to judge books. This one looks especially nice on my shelf.

Once I threw it at a guy named Dave Stein. Needless to say, in all of it's verbose and long-winded glory the book did adequate damage. For this I am grateful to Taylor. Alas, 1200 blank pages between two pieces of sturdy cardboard would undoubtedly have served a similar purpose.

As for Sarang's review, it is garbage and should not be paid the slightest attention. He is from Tanzania and has no business posting reviews on this forum.

Dice is ok, but I don't like his review either.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good book, makes things very clear
Review: I was in the same physics class as reviewer Sarang Gopalakrishnan below. I'd like to note that he is a genius and takes five classes a semester including General Relativity/Differential Geometry as a junior and is a triple major in Math, Physics, and English. So obviously he found this book tedious and long. This book was written by a professor from the University of Colorado and thus is probably geared toward, um... well, let's just say maybe not MIT students. He takes many pages to explain everything step by step, lest the less quick-witted ones among us get lost. The math is kept (relatively) simple and he doesn't use indices or anything. Basic knowledge of calculus is assumed, but he pretty much walks you through vector calculus, differential equations, and matrix algebra.

There are plenty of problems, and while some are "difficult" he walks you through all the steps so it's really just grunt work. I found many of them difficult but I am just generally lazy and stupid. I probably got a C in this class.

Bottom line, if you go to Caltech you'll probably want to pick up a shorter book that covers a broader range of material more quickly but assumes greater background knowledge. If you're looking for something that's not too hard but long-winded, this is for you.

Rating:
Summary: Way too long
Review: Taylor's book has its good points, but it's still somewhat unsatisfactory. Its chief fault is verbosity. Taylor often meanders on for pages without any equations at all, explaining his algebra or saying how beautiful a result is or something but not really saying very much. He has avoided being dense, but has ended up being often sparse and boring. Also, his organisation is sometimes poor, for example in the proof of Lagrange's equations for a constrained particle, where he proves various propositions whose relevance to the main claim is hinted vaguely at. There are several instances -- esp. in the "Calculus of Variations" chapter -- where he glosses over mathematical details (moving derivatives inside integrals, etc) that are not obvious.

He works out plenty of examples in detail, possibly more detail than necessary, but they make sense and are helpful. His problems are usually straightforward and not very challenging, though some of them involve tedious algebra. Problems are marked with one, two or three stars depending on how difficult Taylor thinks they are, but the three-star problems are not, to my mind, noticeably harder than the two-star ones.

Rating:
Summary: The Unhappy Medium
Review: Taylor's book isn't bad. However, it does have some problems, the chief one being verbosity. As other reviewers have mentioned, Taylor often uses quite a few words to say not very much at all. It seems as though he tried to mimic the chatty style of Griffiths, but went a bit overboard. Though I generally don't mind verbosity, at times even I was annoyed by the slow pace of the book - especially after I checked Goldstein's book out of the library and was able to see how much more elegantly and efficiently he was able to cover the same material (and more!).

The upside to Taylor's wordiness is that he generally manages to explain everything in an easy-to-understand manner. It may even be easy enough to serve as a text for an introductory physics course, though that could be a stretch. Unfortunately, this book is probably at a level too high for an introductory course, but at the same time too low for a more advanced course.

The overall organisation of the book is not bad. Taylor divides it into "essential" material for a one-semester course and optional material that can be studied if time permits. The first five chapters review Newtonian mechanics (Newton's Laws, projectile motion, momentum, energy and harmonic oscillations). If the book is being used in an intermediate class, these chapters should be blasted through as quickly as possible (possibly just left to reader), in order to get to the more interesting material in the rest of the book. The essential material is rounded out by chapters on the calculus of variations, Lagrange's equation, the two-body central force problem, non-inertial reference frames, rigid-body rotation, coupled oscillations and normal modes, all designed to be read in sequence. The optional material consists of five chapters on nonlinear mechanics and chaos, Hamiltonian mechanics, collision theory, special relativity and continuum mechanics. These chapters are designed to be mutually independent - none depends on any of the others, so they can be read in any order.

There are plenty of problems, which Taylor labels with one, two or three stars, depending on their difficulty (though I personally found some of the two-star problems more challenging than most of the three-star ones). Taylor also includes some problems that need to be done using Mathematica or Maple, which is a plus. These problems are clearly marked and can give students some experience with this increasingly important software.

I had some trouble deciding between three and four stars, but eventually decided to go with three. However, I was already familiar with all of the mathematics Taylor introduces. Those who would be meeting eigenvalues and differential equations for the first time may find the book somewhat more interesting than I did.

Rating:
Summary: The Final Word
Review: This is a good book. I've actually only read the pre-print edition, so maybe I'm not qualified to review it. But that's OK, because I don't intend to review it. Anyway, if youre actually here looking for a review you are a huge toolshed. The only reason you should read this book is if it was assigned for a class or something. If youre the kind of clown who reads physics textbooks for fun I advise you to remove yourself from my presence, you goddam geekass loser. I do have some revelations about the other reviewers on this site that might strain their credibility.

Foss-Feig was pretty much on point about Sarang Gopalakrishnan. The kid is shameless. I have it on good authority that he once admitted that for $200 he would let a monkey penetrate his rear end. What kind of sick person would do that?

But dont think Mike Foss-Feig is some kind of saint either. Unless you think he's the patron saint of poopitude, in which case yeah he is a saint. Foss-Feig probably doesn't even know what "verbose" means, he just copied it from David Schaich's review. He always copies stuff. This one time, I was trying to start a trend where people would say "crisp" instead of "cool" or "tight" or whatever. You know, like "Dude, your new kicks are totally crisp." But Foss-Feig copied me and started telling everyone the whole crisp thing was his invention, and for some reason everyone believed him and thought I was a desperate loser trying to get attention. I hate him with a passion equivalent to the brightness of a thousand supernovae.

David Schaich is my lover. I long for his velvet touch.

Dice is a cool kid, I guess, but he has this gross pimply thing on his neck. Its not even a pimple, its some kind of boil, I think, because its alway oozing this yellowish goo. Anyway its really disgusting. Whenever I talk to him I have to stare at his crotch so I don't accidentally catch sight of that gross protrusion. So what could he possibly know about books if he cant even get rid of his nauseating boil.

Anyway, the book is pretty good. It has some cool examples and stuff. Could you lend me 4 or 5 dollars?