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| Classical Mechanics (3rd Edition)
Hardcover
Edition: 3
Author: Herbert Goldstein, Charles P. Poole, John L. Saf
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Release Date: 2001-06-25
ISBN-10: 0201657023
ISBN-13: 9780201657029
List Price: $133.80
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
For thirty years this has been the acknowledged standard in advanced classical mechanics courses. This classic book enables readers to make connections between classical and modern physics - an indispensable part of a physicist's education. In this new edition, Beams Medal winner Charles Poole and John Safko have updated the book to include the latest topics, applications, and notation, to reflect today's physics curriculum. They introduce readers to the increasingly important role that nonlinearities play in contemporary applications of classical mechanics. New numerical exercises help readers to develop skills in how to use computer techniques to solve problems in physics. Mathematical techniques are presented in detail so that the book remains fully accessible to readers who have not had an intermediate course in classical mechanics. For college instructors and students.
sucks
| Customer Rating: | | once again, another crappy grad physics book. difficult problems that don't really teach you a damn thing. the flow is incoherent and leaves out key steps in derivations. |
Excellent
| Customer Rating: | | An outstandingly good quality book, both in content and in the book itself. Very satisfied. |
Could be worse...
| Customer Rating: | | Goldstein has very hit and miss moments in the book. Sometimes he is incredibly clear and sometimes he leaves a big question mark over your head with drawn out text. He could have been much more concise in his explanations as he tends to ramble on making a large chunk of text unreadable. However, every graduate student will learn the Kameltonian ;) and appreciate the way Goldstein can present a problem. I would recommend this in conjunction with Landau's text on mechanics. |
Powerful, somewhat old-fashioned
| Customer Rating: | This is one of the most common books used in advanced undergraduate classes in mechanics. It covers the fundamentals of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism, and many applications are analyzed in great depth. The book is written very carefully, and is full of insightful comments along the way. Due to this reason, the book may look a bit heavy for some readers, but time-conscious readers should be aware of the fact that many of these comments can be skipped without damage. On the other hand, those who do read all the comments learn a lot.
Unfortunately, the book is a little bit old-fashioned (the first version of the book was conceived in the late 1940s), and I believe some of the comments and lines of reasoning would be written a bit differently today. For example, the book gives the impression that Newton's laws are more fundamental than the action principle, while it is more useful to think the other way around. The presentation of field theory in the last chapter is brief and somewhat cumbersome. Nowadays, that field theory is a standard tool of modern physics (it is essential for elementary particle physics and very useful in condensed matter physics), I would prefer a book that puts more emphasis on field theory and its various applications. |
Good contents but can be written clearer
| Customer Rating: | I gave this book a 4-star because some parts of it are in fact not so clearly written, as some of the previous reviewers have pointed out. Yet it is probably the only book out there that explains classical mechanics at the level of sophistication and comprehensiveness suitable for an advanced physics student. This book is aimed at the graduate audience but in my opinion any undergraduate students with a solid introductory mechanics course should have no problem understanding most of the materials in this book though I have to admit that the authors did not do a very good job in explaining the concepts.
A distinct feature of this book is that it tries to teach classical mechanics in a way that illuminates many analogous approaches in quantum theory. By this I mean the theoretical constructions such as the Hamilton-Jacobi theory, Poisson brackets, canonical perturbation theory, relativistic field theory, and so on. This book is probably a must read for beginners of theoretical physics because some of the theoretical methods exploited here appear almost ubiquitously in other fields of physics. In the study of other subjects of physics, I was often reminded of the little bits of things I picked up from this book: variational principles, tensors and forms, symmetry groups, field theoretical ideas, etc.
Of course, the main goal of this book is to introduce the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics. The book is actually strong in this aspect. The first few chapters I think are very well written, especially the chapter on central force which is the most thorough treatment I have seen. There are things one hardly sees in other books of this type, such as the Lenz vector which would find a beautiful use in the quantum Kepler problem. However, the book tends to lose clarity in the latter chapters. The three chapters on Hamiltonian mechanics can be much better written. The chapter on chaos serves as nothing but a really rough introduction. Readers interested in these areas will probably benefit better by looking at other books written exclusively on Hamiltonian dynamics or chaos.
After all this is a good book mostly because I haven't yet found any other book at this level that does a better job. If one finds it difficult to read I would suggest getting the book by Marion and Thornton which contains many step-by-step derivations and tons of examples and in my opinion serves as a great companion to this book. Another book at almost the same level is the legendary book by Landau which is extremely concise and get-to-the-point. So some people may like Landau's style better. However, in my opinion, no other books can really replace this one as a comprehensive treatment of classical mechanics. |
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