A First Course in General Relativity,   ISBN:9780521277037

Customer Rating: 

Schultz's book was recommended in Sean Carroll's on-line physics notes. It is terrific for someone who has a good grasp of Special Relativity but needs some hand holding in General Relativity. I think I am actually grasping the ideas mathematically for the first time.

Customer Rating: 

This books spends a good amount on the basic math and introduction to tensors. You don't need much background to make your way through the material. It provides a nice set of exercises to reinforce the concepts presented in the text.

Customer Rating: 

This book is a good introduction to relativity which does not pull punches mathematically speaking but still manages to be merciful to the beginner. I read this book with only a basic background in freshman college physics and calculus. It took me 2 6-month sessions over 2 years to go through it all in detail but it was worth it. It gave me a sufficient familiarity with the core concepts and underlying mathematics to consider tackling a more advanced book on relativity someday.

Customer Rating: 

Nice introduction to GR. Not extensive previous knowledge needed and as clear as it could be.

Customer Rating: 

There are a lot of books on General Relativity. In approach they vary from no math, to essentially math books. This book is somewhere in the middle. It is said to be suitable for a one year course for beginning graduate students or for undergraduates in physics who have studied special relativity, vector calculus, and electrostatics.

To enable such a student to follow the math in in this book the first part of the book reviews special relativity and vector analysis. Then the book has a section on Tensor Analysis, which was newly developed in Einstein's time when it was called tensor calculus. The treatment of these mathematical concepts in this book are, in my mind, sufficient for a review for a student that had studied them before, but will require some pretty good insight for a student that had not seen them before. This background information covers about a third of the book.

Chapter 5 of the book starts out, 'Until now we have discussed only SR.' The next two thirds cover curvature, physics in a curved spacetime, the Einstein field equations, gravitational radiation (the biggest chapter in the book), and on to the rest of GR.

By the end of the book the student has indeed completed a 'first course' in GR. There is still plenty more to go for the interested student specializing in this area.