Classical Mechanics: A Modern Introduction

Rating:
Summary: elementary mechanics
Review: The book is at a level between general physics books like Serwary and HRW and the undergrad mechanics books like those by Arya, Symon, and more recently by Taylor. Book is written by a British physicist, and is probably aimed at a British audiance. American universities don't have a class between these two types of books (not necessarily a good thing), so I doubt if most professors hear would go for it. Most of the concepts you would cover in a undergrad mechanics course are here, but the mathematical level is lower than the books mentioned above, so it won't train you (or force you :-)) as much to think mathematically about physical problems, if this book helps you it will most likely be in the conceptual part. Of course having a strong conceptual understanding of physics is most important, but part of the job of clssical mechanics courses is to introduce to students mathematics of physics, this can mean various ODEs, calculus of variatons, methods of approximations, order of magnitude estimates etc. I liked the fact that he takes on specail relativity early. Book seems to be typed in Word, looking at the figures. I am not saying that the other books are perfect, every book has its own problems (especially Symon), I just wanted remark on the differnces.