A Modern Course in Statistical Physics

Rating:
Summary: Cumbersome
Review: I found this book to be clumsy in its notation and sloppy in its delivery. The information presented in the book is more than comprehensive, however. Each chapter ends with a "special topics" section that covers new and old ideas in the field. Yet the book manages to fall short with its organization and presentation. When new concepts are introduced, very little background is given, and steps in calculations are often bypassed. There are many examples to follow, but even the examples seem pointless when the next step in the derivation has been skipped and it takes the reader several minutes to find the connection. In addition, the book is a somewhat poor reference in the way that many chapters cannot stand alone, due to the quirky notation that is scattered all over the book. If one is not familiar with this notation, then if one wishes to reference the book, he or she will have to waste time finding out why the author uses a capital N there and a small n here, a "mu prime" there and a "mu" here, or a vector k there and an apparently scalar k here.

In summary, the book is comprehensive, covering a wide range of ideas both new and old, but it fails in the fact that it cannot present the information in a clear manner.

Rating:
Summary: an excellent textbook for graduate students
Review: I'm glad that there's "eventually" a stat-mech textbook that takes from grads' points of view. It starts from a undergrad level of thermodyanmics and ends to somewhere close to renormalization group. It's a book with clear examples, figures, and explicit derivation of equations for average grad students rather than particular flock of "genius". I gave it two thumbs up.

Rating:
Summary: The best grad-level book on this subject I've seen
Review: This is not a book for total beginners, but those with a good math background and at least a rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics should be able to bring their knowledge to a very high level by diligently studying Reichl's text.

The book starts out with a couple of chapters on "non-statistical" thermodynamics and a few chapters on probability and stochastic processes; this provides a firm foundation for the equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to which the latter two-thirds of the book is devoted. Throughout the book the explanations and derivations are very clear, and the inclusion of worked sample problems is a definite plus. Highly recommended for any grad student (or advanced undergrad) in physics, materials science, etc.