Quantum Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers (Classroom Resource Materials),   ISBN:9780521897839

Customer Rating: 

My major is physics, and i bought this book to learnmyself. The book is clear and requires less background knowledge, 2 years of basic college math and physics are enough.

Customer Rating: 

As a physicist, I bought this book more for curiosity than to study itself. And I must confess I was really surprised by the conciseness of the text. It is a really nice and good introductory book. It doesn't go into the details and math formalism, but it does provide a nice physical insight, as well as good explanations. I recommend this book if you are looking for an introductory quantum mechanics text.

Customer Rating: 

I am teaching myself quantum mechanics with the goal of understanding original research articles. I have found Miller to be extraordinarily well written and suitable for self-study. As an overall introduction to QM for self-study, I think Miller would be hard to beat, providing a nice balance between physical applications and mathematics. (For those sensitive to the physical quality of a book, Miller is very nicely produced and easy on aging eyes.)

Customer Rating: 

Many textbooks, in general, suffer in readability due to the author assuming the reader thinks just as he or she does, or knows a sufficient amount of information prior to reading. David Miller is one of those authors that is just the opposite: he never assumes you know anything that isn't in his book (other than that you know how to read and do basic math). In addition, Miller has the unique ability to relate complex and complicated concepts to common examples. You will find that reading through this text is much smoother than with other textbooks. There are also solutions to certain problems and viewgraphs available for free online.

The topics in the book cover the basic quantum mechanical scenarios, such as simple 1D/3D potentials, operators, the uncertainty principle (taught in two ways...Griffiths provides a third), matrix formalism, Dirac notation, angular momentum, spin, and the Hydrogen atom. In addition, more advanced topics, such as perturbation theory (time independent and dependent), the density matrix, and approximation techniques. Miller also relates much of the material to photonics topics, such as absorption, Fermi's Golden Rule, non-linear effects, refractive index, and much more. As an EE professor, he also covers some band theory of crystalline solids.

I feel that this book is extremely complete and will be extremely useful for anyone wanting to learn Quantum Mechanics. I've also used Griffiths and Singh, which are also excellent texts. I feel that Griffiths accompanies this text very well (so having both is more than complete). I have yet to find an error in the text, and this is most likely because Miller wrote this originally as a course reader that was published through Stanford. The course reader has been used by other professors and hundreds of student prior to publishing. This means that your learning won't be plagued or interrupted with errors, or with the need to purchase a new edition.

Customer Rating: 

Reminiscent of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, the author's clear, conversational writing style makes quantum mechanics tangible (and interesting!) to a wide range of readers.