Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Not a good book February 6, 2008
Clint
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book seems to skip steps that would have help the reader understand the material better. I had to use another book as a reference which made everything make more sense.
It is also very unorganized because of the squeezing of everything into this small sized book. Sections can start right at the bottom of the page. Diagrams and examples are often not on the same page making you flip the pages back and forth 200 times.
This book is a no no for beginners as it is very uncomfortable to read and same goes for the information in it, just throwing stuff at you as if you knew it already.
Bad book=headache
 Excellent February 1, 2007
C. Couch (Houston, TX)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a very good undergrad. book on mechanics. Pretty standard in its coverage: newton's laws, oscillating systems, rigid bodies, lagrangian dynamics. The problems are interesting and doable. The notation remains reasonable at this level (better than marion). The section on rigid body motion is better than most books although the section on lagrangian dynamics is less than average (relative to marion, which is great on this LD). There is a good deal of sample problems provided, which is always helpful. Be prepared to solve ODEs, expand functions and work in various coordinate systems. I would put this book in the 80th percentile of the ten or so books that I have studied on this topic.
Compact yet solid.. October 30, 2006
Bikramjit Ganguly (Prosser,wa usa)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an extraordinarily well written Mechanics book. I think that a first year college student may run into some difficulties with this, simply because he may not have yet acquired the mathematical sophistication to truly appreciate the elegance of the presentation. I do believe though that by the 3rd or 4th year of college, this should be a fairly easy read. I last studied college level physics about 17 years ago, and frankly regret not having access to a book like this at that point. This book has just the right size (less than 1/3rd the length of Taylor), doesn't go into unnecessary details that detract from the matter at hand, and from a mathematical point of view is just brilliant. For somebody seeking to self teach himself basic mechanics, this would be a god send. There are a very large number of problems, and for those who want even more problems, schaums problem compilations should be enough. The level of calculus required is elementary and the author does provide quick intro to tools that are needed, for example working definitions of curl etc. This book is really accessible to even a Ist year college student, with some minimal background preparation in calculus. Of course, if you don't know the derivative of a polynomial, this book may not be for you :)A solid book for the truly interested.
 The opposite of lucid. May 16, 2006
Alex V. Fairley (Boston,Ma)
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
I'm taking a junior level Mechanics course using this text. I've taken Calculus I-III, Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra, and some other miscellaneous maths. This book is ridiculous. It seems as if the authors are attempting to hide the important material. The authors are fond of grandiloquent statements like "the product is unity", which might be a reasonable thing to say if we were talking about some abstract field, but seems a bit silly in a phyiscs text, talking about the number 1. It also seems as if much of the structure of the text that is actually good was lifted directly from Walter Hauser's 1965 text, which at the moment can be had on this site for [...].(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BMSZ54/sr=8-1/qid=1147742638/ref=sr_1_1/103-1656290-8317424?%5Fencoding=UTF8)
Hauser's book is much clearer, and more complete. Particularly, compare the discussion of Harmonic Motion between the two books(page 84-85 Fowles, page 99 Hauser). Fowles' discussion is not nearly as clear or as complete as Hauser's. Fowles' also engages in some rather strange notational pracices, like using unit vectors as prefixes rather than postfixes. What's even more frustrating is that he doesn't even do this consistently. Look at page 37 as compared to page 38. He changes conventions in mid-derivation. All things considered, I would say this text is poorly written and overpriced, and honestly, I'm writing this review at some potential cost to myself as I intend to sell this book as soon as I can get rid of it, something I rarely ever do with my texts.
 Good book overall. April 12, 2006
Stanz (New York)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Many books discuss topics well and are good at providing an understanding at a very fundamental level with clear and rigid explanations, but lack the mathematical formalism for advanced study. Other books are far too cryptic and contain nothing but a sea of equations leaving the reader helpless when trying to figure out what came from where. This book is a very good mix of the two. I am about to finish a two semester sequence of Mechanics using this text and I find it does a very good job of explaining theory and ideas along with guiding you through the mathematics that make it all work.
Before this class I had three semesters of Calculus, one semester of Differential Equations, and a semester of Linear Algebra. With this background I found no difficulty whatsoever in interpreting the text, and most of the derivations are pretty straight forward.
There are a fair amount of worked out examples in each chapter, however, I recommend picking up a problem set book with full solutions. It's one thing to know which equations to use to solve a problem, but developing a keen problem-solving skillset requires looking over fully completed examples so that you can get a feel for the thought process.
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