Customer Reviews

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Physics

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I studies physics over 20 years ago in high school, so perhaps I'm rustier than I realized. BUT, what seemed like a helpful book was seriously marred by repeated inconsistencies between the diagrams and the description of the diagrams in the text. "km/hr" in the text are shown as "km/m" in the diagram; symbols are different; in one case, the text clearly meant to refer to "t" [the symbol for time] but the symbol was just dropped ["if it moves for hours" instead of "if it moves for t hours"]. Plus, the author does a good job of setting up the basic explanations, but when giving example problems, he relies on the diagrams to explain the solutions. Since the diagrams are often wrong or inconsistent, it left me a little muddled. I'm not sure how anyone made it through this book. Didn't they have a copy editor?

At first blush, in the bookstore, this seemed like a great book--but the typos in chapter 2 are infuriating! For example: on page 15 of 2003 edition you travel 15 miles in 3.0 minutes and their answer is 30 miles an hour! Nooooo!!!! Please, this is supposed to help idiots--not be written and proofread by idiots... This is very sloppy publishing and it cannot be tolerated!
A few pages later, the reader is treated to a defintion of acceleration in which a crucial symbol is completely missing.
If not for the typos I would have overlooked the forced enthusiasm in the preamble to the discussion on dimensional analysis, but "All right. Hold on to your hats. Here goes!" begins to annoy one after wasting too much time finding their typos...This is my first Idiots Guide, and it will likely be my last! Shame on the Penguin Group, the parent company!

When I earned an A in Calculus II and decided to take my first Physics course, I realized I needed help learning the concepts. I decided to pick up "the Complete Idiots Guide to Physics." Initially, I thought it was a good purchase because the other Idiot's Guides in the series (Calculus, Programming, etc) were enjoyable and really easy to follow, but not this particular book.

In the beginning, the author would go from one topic to another with very little clarity (I don't know if he continues to do this because I stopped reading after the first four chapters). It was worse than the techings in my assigned Physics textbook for college, but at least my textbook gave numerous sample problems (understanably, the Idiots Guide could never do this).

The quiz questions, entitled "Physics Phun," were not very clear in explaination. I got the majority of those questions incorrect because the questions within the text didn't fully teach enough of the topic for a person to understand. Those questions also lacked some important information to correctly get an answer. The author also failed to explain how the answers to those quiz questions were derived- he only gives the answers in the appendix. How else is a student to learn if there isn't any way to identify what mistakes he/she made while solving problems?

Because of a lack of helpful tutorial matter for beginning physics students to understand the basics, I hoped this book would deliver. Unfortunately, it did not.

I just came home from a visit to my local book store, where I happened to pick up a copy of this book to browse for a bit. At one point the author tries to explain Bernoulli's law but only succeeds in demonstrating that he does not understand it himself. He tries to connect Bernoulli's law with the creation of lift on an airplane wing in a way that is demonstrably wrong (NASA has a proper description of this topic on their web site -> Amazon does not allow URLs). He argues that accelerated air will assume a lower pressure and uses the well known formula of Bernoulli to do so. This is in fact not true and can be proven with very simple class room experiments. The author needs to violate basic physical boundary conditions to make his claims come out right and does so freely. The theory he bases his explanation on is in wide spread circulation but none the less completely wrong. This shows to me that the author is simply copying from other sources, without applying any scrutiny to the facts.

How can you teach physics if you are not willing to learn it properly yourself and if you think proper fact checking is just a waste of time?

What seemed like a good book in the bookstore turned out to be a disaster. I am a sophmore student in high school and I barely passed physics with a 70 last semester.
Don't get this book. It is so annoying. (Sorry to the author in case he is reading this), but this book doesn't help at all. He basically repeats the same information five different ways. All we need to do is hear it once.
I am a huge idiot's guide fan. Most idiot's guides authors have enormous passions with what they are talking about. However, Johnnie does not have a passion at all in his writing. No inspiration to the reader to want to learn the material.
Instead of just telling us the formula for universal gravitation, tell us also why we need it. Why it is important.
If you can handle the constant repition than go ahead and read it, but it will take a lot of effort to dig through it.
-Jeff

In coming to a great end to my senior year physics class I would like to thank Johnnie Dennis for writing his book. I purchased The Complete Idiots Guide to Physics before my yearlong physics course began. In doing so it allowed me to more easily comprehend the conceptual and physical aspects to physics. As the year progressed I have had a clear advantage over my fellow classmates because of this book. Not only did the Idiots Guide give me a different way to view problems and concepts but it also helped me to fully understand subjects as projectile motion and electricity because of these different views. To be a little more specific, Chapter 5: Pushes and Pulls, was more useful and gave me a better understanding of forces than my textbook or my teacher did.

Overall I really liked the book and found it to be a great tool in learning physics. The book clearly and thoroughly explained what I was learning about in class. A great addition to this book was the Physics Phun problems. The Phun problems were surprisingly helpful in allowing me to gage what I knew and didn't know. I highly recommend this book.

I think the only reason why this book has a few good reviews must be because the authors themselves wrote them. The book was decent until about the 3rd or 4th chapter. There were many mistakes in the calculations which made it hard to learn. Was I wrong or was the book wrong? I don't know because the appendix only comes with (sometimes incorrect) answers and not explanations! This book also has a few formulas that were either a) incorrectly followed by the author or b) very complicated with steps that are not obvious THAT THE AUTHOR SHOULD HAVE EXPLAINED. Seriously, the book is called The Complete Idiot's Guide to Physics. The author should assume that the reader knows very little about the subject. Don't buy this book. Borrow it from the library and take it back when you get to the part where the authors got tired of writing (ch3-4).

Having wasted money several times purchasing books in the "Complete Idiot" series, I will only borrow them from the library when no other books on the subject are available. This book is a prime example. It fails to completely explain the sample problems it uses and makes references to places in the book that don't exist. There are errors in calculations in the sample problems that were driving me nuts till I read other reviews which revealed I was not the problem.

I bought this book five years ago and recently picked it up again. I remember now how frustrating it was to read because I wrote those frustrations in the margins. The writing is awful and unclear, and the writer seems to think that he is hilarious. With all due respect to a National Teacher of the Year, the guy is just not funny. Maybe his classroom was, but not this. I would recommend that no one ever buy this book again so that it can go out of print and not be seen in bookstores for some unsuspecting person to buy. Please, PLEASE, do NOT buy it!!!

Book is not as easy at it promotes itself. Explanations are few, and a lot of background info in just not there. It helps, but now what I expected.