Customer Reviews

Astrophysics of the Diffuse Universe

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I used this as my textbook when teaching a graduate course on the interstellar medium. It has good explanations of a lot of current material, and includes some very detailed derivations for the advanced or interested reader. However, a lot of the basics are glossed over or not clearly explained - this book really needs to go hand in hand with Spitzer's "Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium" to provide a complete picture. In any case, the big problem with this book is the ridiculous number of errors and typos (I and my students found over 100). This would just be annoying if all these errors were minor things like spelling mistakes. However, many of the errors are catastrophic, e.g. explaining spectroscopic notation but getting the labels all wrong, errors in the derivation of atomic levels, a calculation of cooling timescales which is wrong by a factor of 10^5, etc etc. This proved a very frustrating experience for me and for my students. Unless a second edition comes out with all these mistakes corrected, next time I will likely use this book for reference, but not recommend it to the students, so as to spare them this pain.

Another reviewer pointed out the shear amount of typos in this text book, so that remains relevant. I also echo the lack of pedagogical effectiveness, for which I do not necessarily blame the authors --- when is the last time you actually have encountered a pedagogically effective textbook? Although the discussions of physical concepts are probably not as deep or helpful as other textbooks considered to be of more pedagogical nature, what I find valuable in this textbook is the up-to-date reference and the connections made between the various astrophysical phenomena that might escape attention when being bogged down into the details of interpreting what physics says about a particular ISM question. As a student I used Spitzer and Osterbrock and found them to be pedagogically more effective, but when I picked up this textbook, I was also pleased about seeing how things that I learned from the other texts fit into a larger, more up-to-date astrophysical context. For that I think the book deserves a spot as a reference in any graduate level ISM course.

This is another of the books I had to use for my graduate ISM course. I dont know what the problem is, but every book Ive read on the ISM was terrible at explaining things (because confusion in this subject is very easy), and none of them have an INDEX thats worth a crap. So dont expect to be able to do the homework problems in there.

Dopita is written a little better than Osterbrock, and there isnt the ridiculous amount of tables strewn within the text, but its not MUCH better.